Attribution Debt
Attribution debt is the gap between what your ad platforms claim drove revenue and what actually caused it, carried quarter after quarter into the budget. It is how marketing debt accrues: allocate on claimed conversions long enough and the plan itself becomes the liability.
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By Joris van Huët, Founder & CEOUpdated 2 min read
What is Attribution Debt?
Attribution debt is the cause: every self-attributing platform (Meta, Google, TikTok) claims the same sale inside its own window, nobody deduplicates, and last-click erases assist channels, so the claimed-versus-caused gap gets rebuilt into each planning cycle. Marketing debt is the compounding cost of that gap on the P&L.
Why Attribution Debt matters for ecommerce
Attribution debt is invisible from inside any single platform dashboard because each platform is grading its own homework. It compounds silently: the longer allocation runs on claimed conversions, the larger the eventual correction.
Frequently asked questions
What is attribution debt?
Attribution debt is the gap between what your ad platforms claim drove revenue and what actually caused it, carried quarter after quarter into the budget. Every planning cycle that allocates spend on claimed conversions rolls that gap forward instead of paying it down.How is attribution debt different from marketing debt?
Attribution debt is the measurement gap itself: platform-claimed revenue versus caused revenue. Marketing debt is the compounding cost that gap creates on the P&L when budgets keep being allocated on the wrong numbers. Attribution debt is how marketing debt accrues.How do you pay down attribution debt?
Replace claimed conversions with causal evidence in the allocation decision. That means estimating each channel's incremental effect: Incremental Sales = Revenue with the channel minus Revenue without it. Reallocating toward channels with proven lift stops the gap from compounding into next quarter's plan.