Attribution

Attribution answers the question “where did this customer come from?”. It assigns credit for a lead or a sale to the touchpoints that led to it: a post, an ad, an email, a popup or a chat. Simple models give all the credit to the first or the last touch; more advanced ones split it across several steps.

For a small business, attribution is how you stop spending time and money on channels that only look busy. Without it, a network with lots of likes may seem like the winner even if every paying customer actually came from your newsletter or a friend’s recommendation.

Example: an online shop tags links in Instagram stories and in its email with different UTM parameters. A month later it sees that stories bring many visits but emails bring most of the orders, so it moves effort towards growing the mailing list.

In AI SMM, popups and email campaigns show which popup or campaign brought which sale, so you can compare them by money, not only clicks.