How Web Attribution Works
Web attribution is the practice of crediting the marketing campaign or traffic source that brought a visitor to your website, and following that visitor through to a sign-up or purchase. A small script on the site records each visit along with the campaign tags in its URL (such as UTM parameters) and any ad click IDs. When the visitor later signs up or buys, that conversion is tied back to the stored source data.
For example, a visitor clicks a Meta ad on Monday, returns through a Google ad on Thursday, and buys on Thursday. Web attribution records both touches, so you can credit the Meta ad that found the customer, the Google ad that converted them, or both, using first-touch or last-touch credit.
For a full walkthrough, read What is web attribution? on the blog.
What Web Attribution Measures
- Visits and unique visitors by source, medium and campaign
- Sign-ups and purchases credited to a source
- Revenue per campaign, and return on ad spend when cost data is connected
- Traffic by class, such as paid, organic search, social, referral, direct and AI assistants
Web Attribution vs Web Analytics
Web analytics describes what visitors do on your site: pages viewed, time spent, bounce rate. Web attribution answers a different question: which source deserves credit for the conversion. The two often share the same tracking script, but attribution adds stored touch data, a credit model (first touch, last touch, multi-touch) and the link to ad spend.
If you also have a mobile app, web-to-app attribution covers the handoff from the website to an install.
Web Attribution in Linkrunner
Linkrunner is a mobile and web attribution platform. Its Web SDK, currently in beta, captures page views, UTMs, ad click IDs and traffic sources on a website, and keeps both first-touch and last-touch data so either can receive credit. See the web attribution page for details on the beta.