The Attribution playbook.

The audio brief.

One narrator, five minutes, the whole shape of the project — now with the deck that runs alongside it. Play it before you open anything else; it's the fastest way to get into the right mindset for an attribution build. In a hurry? Change the speed under the deck — it sticks next time.

Four phases, one motion.

Every Attribution project moves through the same four phases. Know what you produce in each — and know that, like CPQ, this is a project you win or lose in the Blueprint, then keep winning in Maintain.

Kick off a project in one paste.

Don't dig through the GitHub repo. Copy this prompt, drop in the customer name, and send it to your Claude. It clones the template, reads the AGENTS.md, and walks the Blueprint checklist with you.

Lead source is the what. Channel is the where.

This is the one thing to internalize before anything else. Attribution isn't a single field — it answers two different questions with two different sets of fields, and people conflate them constantly.

Each question nests — group → item → detail → exact.

Both dimensions are a set of Russian dolls: a high-level bucket, the value itself, a level of specificity, and a free-text exact. Depth is a choice — match it to the questions, don't max it out by reflex.

Don't start cold. Start from our standard, then tailor.

Most marketers have some attribution experience but haven't gone deep. Hand them our taxonomy as the starting point and edit from there — it's far faster than a blank page. Here's the shape of it.

Add AI and AEO to the taxonomy — every time.

Our old attribution standard was written for a pre-AI world and is missing generative engines entirely. In 2026 that's a hole in the funnel. Answer Engine Optimization traffic is real pipeline, and if it isn't in the taxonomy it reads as direct. Make it first-class.

Start from the entry points, not a blank taxonomy.

The fastest way in: give the client homework — come to the kickoff with a flowchart of how records enter the system and where they go. That map hands you the lead sources and channels to account for, and the inflection points where you need to answer "where did this come from."

What Blueprint hands over.

Three artifacts come out of Blueprint, and everything in Build is downstream of them. Get them signed off before you automate a single tag.

UTMs on everything — from a restricted pick list.

This is the backbone of the whole model. Every marketing link, campaign, and channel carries UTMs, drawn from an agreed set of values so the data comes in clean. Give the team a UTM builder so they can't freelance.

Turn "fake direct" into real attribution.

The move that gets you close to a 100% model. When a visitor lands with no UTMs, empty data looks like direct traffic — but they came from somewhere. A small piece of custom JavaScript recovers it.

First touch, MQL touch, Latest touch.

Three touch-sets on the contact, each stamping the full picture — lead source (with detail & exact), channel, subchannel, campaign, and the raw UTMs. The template ships the whole field list for both platforms.

First and Latest are two touches. Campaigns hold the rest.

First and Latest capture the ends. For everything in between, use campaigns — the standard way to hold the whole multi-touch lifecycle. It's not weighted; it answers "how many things did they interact with before converting."

Roll it up to the deal — from the primary contact.

Lead attribution feeds opportunity attribution. Keep it simple: attribute the opp off one person, and treat partners as a channel with a little extra plumbing.

The human element is where attribution leaks.

Not everything can be automated. A rep who meets someone at a booth and adds them from memory looks like sales outbound forever. The manual paths need a written process and real buy-in on why it matters.

Brief before, cut over quiet, then office hours.

Same shape as every LeanScale cutover — pre-brief the team, flip it when the system's quiet, then hold office hours while the first real touches flow through and surface what's missing.

What kicks off maintenance.

Any one of these adds or changes a value — and every value has to reach the taxonomy, the translator, the workflows, and the change log.

The ways attribution quietly goes wrong.

None of these throw an error. They just slowly poison the report until nobody trusts it — which is why the change log and a periodic audit exist.

On events, and on a clock.

Some maintenance is reactive; some has to be scheduled or it never happens. Do both.

The assets, in one place.

The team gets this landing page with the brief, a one-paste prompt, and the template repo behind it. The client gets a taxonomy, a wired field model, a UTM builder, the tracking code, and an owner who keeps it true.