A Primer to Customer Attribution

To understand customer decision-making, businesses need to track their customers' interactions across various platforms such as advertising, social media, website or mobile app event tracking, CRM tools, ecommerce, and payment processing. By attributing these interactions to the same customer, companies can build a comprehensive chronology of the customer journey from discovery to retention. Identifying customers across platforms can be achieved using IP addresses, cookies, user agents, email or social media accounts, and UTM extensions. Several traditional customer attribution models exist, including last-touch, first-touch, U-shaped, linear, and decay attribution, each assigning different weights to various stages of customer interactions. Automated data integration tools like Fivetran can help businesses manage the large volumes of data generated by multiple platforms and devices.