The Attribution Playbook You do the work. You cannot tell what pays. Find the part that does.
You split your evenings across five activities, and four of them probably produce nothing. You just cannot tell which four. This guide shows how to find out, with one person, no ad budget and an evening of setup.
You do not have a marketing problem.
You have a visibility problem being mistaken for one. The fixes are completely different. Your marketing costs evenings, not money, and you do not get them back. Analytics tells you what happened on your site. It does not tell you which of it earned anything. So you keep doing all of it, because stopping feels riskier than carrying on.
None of them is "data is good".
The fastest return is finding the losers. You are almost certainly spending evenings on something that produces nothing. It survives because nobody can prove it does not. Evidence ends that argument.
Alone, marketing decisions get settled by whatever you enjoyed most recently. A shared number lets bad ideas die quietly and unimpressive good ones survive long enough to prove themselves.
Content, a podcast, a community and search pay back in quarters. Measured naively, the writing that made someone search for you gets no credit and then gets cut.
See which posts and topics produce customers rather than traffic, and you learn what your market wants from you. Next quarter writes itself.
A blended cost per customer hides everything that matters. Split by source, it shows which channels produce customers who stay, and the cheapest to acquire is often not the cheapest to serve.
A year of it shows your real sales cycle and the lag between effort and effect. Every month you decide slightly better than you would have blind, and those stack.
A compass, not a ledger.
You will never attribute all of your revenue, and anything claiming otherwise is a comfortable fiction. This guide shows how to measure for direction and comparison, and how to act on what it tells you.
Five parts, in order.
Six mechanisms, each a specific lever that pays on its own, and the honest limit of what any tracker can see.
The one outcome that counts, the three layers, first touch against last touch, your lookback window, a naming convention, and what to do about channels you cannot tag.
One tracker, a form that carries the history, the outcome in the same place as the identity, tagging that does not drift, and a funnel that counts properly.
Three questions for every channel, the gap between first and last touch, fair trials for slow channels, a monthly review and a written rule for killing a channel.
Before you instrument, the instrumentation evening, and the monthly review. Each line is a box you either can or cannot tick.
Nine ways attribution becomes an expense. All of them are failures of definition and discipline, not of tooling.
One sentence, and make it money if you possibly can. Signups are easy to count and make every channel look good. A source sending free tourists beats one sending three serious buyers on every signup view.
Do not pick one. The gap between them is the most informative number you will have. It shows which channels create demand and which only harvest it.
Arrive from a tagged link, fill in a real form, then open the person record it created. If the source did not arrive with it, that form is where your attribution dies.
- You run a one-person business and want to scale it, and you cannot say which of your marketing earns the money.
- You are willing to be told that something you are proud of is not working.
- You are ready to cut a channel when the numbers say so.
- You want a method for one person, not a project for a data team.
- You want a number that reconciles to the cent. The guide says that is a fiction.
- You want a tool recommendation to install before you have decided what counts.
- You expect a dashboard to change your decisions without a monthly review.
- You are not willing to stop doing anything.
An evening of setup buys you permission to stop.
You are spending the scarcest thing you own on this. Not money, evenings. Some of them are going into things that produce nothing, and you carry on because stopping feels riskier. That uncertainty is what makes marketing exhausting. Measure it once, honestly, and you can finally put the evenings where the money is.
Luis Gonçalves
Twenty years in digital product development. Led the agile transformation at Nokia. Teaches at Porto Business School. Has spent the last decade working with founders across Saudi Arabia, Portugal, Brazil, and the broader emerging-market startup ecosystem.
He calls himself the Dark Entrepreneur because he believes the founder world is allergic to honesty. No success theater. No highlight reels. Just the real work that has to happen.