Own the pipe: attribution API keys and exports

If your attribution history exists only inside a vendor's dashboard, you do not own it, and the day you switch tools you start again from zero. Portability is decided at signup, not at cancellation.

This is not a warning about villains. Most vendors are not withholding anything deliberately. It is simply that export is nobody's priority until a customer leaves, and by then the customer has no leverage.

The four questions to settle before you commit

A CSV of midpoints is not your attribution history, it is a screenshot of it. Without the confidence interval and the coverage share, next year's you cannot tell which of last year's numbers were strong and which were noise wearing a decimal point.

Why history is the asset

The single read is a decision input. The history is something better: it is the record that lets you check whether your decisions worked. A brand with two years of per-channel causal estimates, each with its interval, can ask whether the channels it scaled actually delivered, and whether the ones it cut were missed.

That record is also what makes the next vendor evaluation honest, because you can replay your own history against a new method rather than accepting whatever the new method says about the last thirty days. We made the general case in you do not own your attribution data.

Keys are an ownership question too

An API key you cannot create yourself is a dependency on a person. An API key you cannot rotate yourself is a security problem waiting for a staff change. Both are ownership questions dressed as convenience questions, and both are worth resolving before the first invoice rather than after the first incident.

Scope the key to the job. A reporting integration needs read access to reports and nothing else. If the only key on offer is one that can also change settings or billing, that is a design decision the vendor made and a risk you inherit.

Where this lands on Causality Engine

The input is your own Google Analytics export, so the source data never stops being yours. The company is registered in the Netherlands and the data residency question is answered in the privacy policy rather than in a sales conversation.

The €99 one-time read is deliberately a small commitment: one export, one read, a full refund within 30 days, no questions asked. That is a different shape of relationship from a platform that needs a pixel on your site before it can tell you anything, which we covered in attribution without a pixel or engineering.

The one-line test

Ask a vendor to send you an example of the export a cancelling customer receives. The speed and the specificity of the answer tell you more than the feature page does.

Related answers

• The attribution report a CFO will subscribe to
• What an attribution API returns that dashboards hide
• What a good attribution reporting API returns
• Pixel-free attribution keeps your storefront yours
• Keeping the attribution record in your own Notion