What touchpoints get credit in attribution?

An attribution report assigns credit for a KPI to certain engagements along the customer journey.

There are tens of thousands of actions recorded by HockeyStack for each company. Therefore we have to have a way of filtering to the exact engagements we want to receive credit. Attribution touchpoints are the engagements along the customer journey selected for credit distribution towards a KPI.

To give an example, see the below table for actions that a company has recorded. The red actions are ones that a HockeyStack user might want to filter out. The green actions are ones that a HockeyStack user might want to keep. The action at the end is our KPI.

Timestamp	Action Name
2024-04-06 09:21:30	Marketing Email Sent
2024-04-05 09:15:32	Website Session Started
2024-04-05 09:16:05	Scrolled down on webpage
2024-04-05 09:16:45	Website Session Ended
2024-04-05 10:00:30	Outbound Email Sent
2024-04-06 09:23:13	Marketing Email Clicked
2024-04-07 07:07:00	Tradeshow Invited
2024-04-07 10:27:50	Tradeshow Attended
2024-04-08 11:00:00	Deal Created (Pipeline) - $100k

Looking at the above journey, we need to distribute $100k in total credit into actions along the journey.

If we weren’t filtering out touchpoints, the credit distribution would be:

Action Name
Marketing Email Sent	$12.5k
Website Session Started	$12.5k
Scrolled down on webpage	$12.5k
Website Session Ended	$12.5k
Outbound Email Sent	$12.5k
Marketing Email Clicked	$12.5k
Tradeshow Invited	$12.5k
Tradeshow Attended	$12.5k
Deal Created (Pipeline) - $100k	→ This is our KPI

But it doesn’t make sense for a “scroll down” action to be attributed $12.5k, so we instead want the below distribution:

Action Name
Marketing Email Sent	0
Website Session Started	$33.3k
Scrolled down on webpage	0
Website Session Ended	0
Outbound Email Sent	0
Marketing Email Clicked	$33.3k
Tradeshow Invited	0
Tradeshow Attended	$33.3k
Deal Created (Pipeline) - $100k	→ This is our KPI

HockeyStack does this filtering using the “attribute by” option in reports.

If the property that is selected as the "attribute by" is not empty and the action it is tied to has a timestamp that is before the timestamp of the KPI chosen for attribution, then that property is used as an attribution touchpoint.

If your attribute by does not have an associated timestamp, it won’t be usable in attribution. Examples include company properties & user properties. For example, many HockeyStack users try to use Lead Source in their breakdown using an attribution model. This doesn’t make sense because Lead Source is not attached to any timestamp, and does not exist on the customer journey — it’s just a property.