Attribution tracks which channels touched a customer before they bought. That's it. It's a correlation tracker with known, fundamental, mathematical limitations. It gives you direction, not certainty. It guarantees tracking, not outcomes.
The vendor industry — Triple Whale, Northbeam, Hyros — makes this simple thing feel impossibly complicated. Not because it is complicated, but because confusion is profitable. If you understood the limitations, you wouldn't need their premium tier to "solve" a problem that can't be solved.
I've written about this before: the CMO builds a court of domesticated dogs whose job isn't to find truth but to protect the narrative. Attribution is the court's oracle — it produces numbers that look rigorous but can't be verified by anyone without a statistics degree. The dashboard becomes a propaganda machine. Everyone keeps their job. The whole multi-touch discourse exists to keep people employed in the machine.
These aren't edge cases. They're the permanent, structural limitations of every attribution system ever built:
Correlation, not causation.
Attribution tracks who touched what before buying. Not whether the ad caused the purchase. Only incrementality testing answers the causal question. No attribution vendor offers it.
The counterfactual problem.
You can never observe what would have happened without the ad. Would the customer have bought anyway? Attribution can't answer this. No model can. It's not a solvable problem.
The model IS the answer.
Pick first-touch, Facebook looks great. Pick last-touch, Google wins. Same data, different model, completely different budget decision. There is no "correct" model — only assumptions you chose.
Diminishing returns are invisible.
Attribution shows ROAS at current spend. Double the budget and ROAS drops — but the model has no mechanism to warn you. It tells you what happened, not what will happen.
Cross-channel cannibalization.
Cut Facebook and Google tanks — because Facebook drove the awareness Google captured. Attribution assigns credit per channel independently. It can't see these dependencies.
Dark social blindspot.
Word-of-mouth, podcast mentions, friend texts, DMs. The highest-trust acquisition channels are completely invisible to click-stream attribution. It's not a gap — it's a canyon.
Selection bias.
Retargeting and branded search get systematically overcredited because they reach people who were already going to buy. The ad didn't create the demand — it intercepted it.
Additivity problem.
Multi-touch splits one order across channels. Order counts stop adding up. Average the per-channel ROAS and you'll overstate by 44%. Only Amplitude has publicly acknowledged this.
This is what multi-touch models actually produce in practice
Your actual revenue: $20,000 from 100 orders
Facebook (credited): $16,400 (82 orders)
Google (credited): $11,200 (56 orders)
Email (credited): $8,600 (43 orders)
Total credited: $36,200 from 181 orders
181 credited orders from 100 actual orders. $36,200 credited from $20,000 actual.
This isn't a bug. This is how multi-touch models work when they assign points to every touchpoint. Triple Whale admits it in their own docs: total sales assigned to all touchpoints will not correlate with actual sales.
Our stance is simple: there is no right attribution model. There is only least wrong. Anyone telling you they've solved attribution is selling you the confusion.
First-touch and last-touch are least wrong because they're additive and transparent. One order, one channel, one credit. Revenue sums correctly. You can look at a dashboard, understand it, and act on it. Not because they're "right." Because they don't lie about being right.
We give you all five models. We don't hide multi-touch behind a paywall. But we tell you what they won't: use single-touch for decisions, multi-touch for exploration. Use attribution as one input among many — not the oracle.
And our system handles the math correctly regardless. ROAS computed at query time as SUM(weight × revenue) / SUM(spend). Never pre-stored. Never accidentally averaged. Attribution weights store only additive bases. The ratio is recomputed at every aggregation level — channel, medium, source, campaign. No matter which model you choose, the math doesn't lie.