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Observed credit is not incremental lift
The model earns its authority from the question it was designed to answer.
| Question | Instrument | What it can support | What it cannot support alone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Which touch was recorded? | Last click or rule-based attribution | Path description and operational reporting | Causal lift |
| How should observed credit be shared? | Multi-touch model | A chosen allocation of observed credit | What would happen without the touch |
| How did aggregate demand move with spend? | Marketing mix modeling | Scenarios under model assumptions | A clean channel experiment |
| What changed relative to no treatment? | Holdout, lift or ghost-ad design | Incremental outcome under the test conditions | Universal transfer to every segment |
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Reference & Evidence
Source: Author's synthesis of Gordon et al. (2019), Blake, Nosko & Tadelis (2015), Lewis, Rao & Reiley (2011), and Lewis & Rao (2015).
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