Marketing attribution: know what drove the visit

You posted on Instagram, sent a text, ran a small ad, and put a flyer in the window. Business picked up. Now the question that decides where next month’s effort goes: which one of those actually worked?

That question has a fancy name, marketing attribution, and a reputation for being complicated. The enterprise version is. The version a small business needs is not. It comes down to one habit and one clean link.

What marketing attribution actually means

Attribution is simply connecting a result (a visit, a sale, a sign-up) back to the thing that caused it. Big companies build elaborate “multi-touch” models to split credit across dozens of steps in a long buying journey, and that genuinely is complex.

For most businesses, attribution means something far more useful and far simpler: knowing which post, ad, email, or text sent each customer your way, so you can do more of what works and stop paying for what does not.

The trick: a unique link for each thing you do

Here is the whole method. Instead of sending everyone to the same plain web address, you give each campaign its own trackable link. The Instagram post gets one link, the text blast another, the ad a third. When someone clicks, the link quietly records where they came from, and your report tells you which source drove the visit.

The catch with doing this by hand is that trackable links are ugly. They end in a long string of tracking tags (the “UTM” parameters) that looks like spam and that no one wants to share or print.

A one-minute primer on UTMs

UTMs are just labels you add to a link so your analytics can tell where a click came from. Three do most of the work: source (where, like instagram), medium (the type, like social or sms), and campaign (which push, like summer-sale). Tagged consistently, they turn a pile of clicks into a readable report. The only downside is the ugly link, which is the problem a short link solves.

How Wallet does it

Wallet’s link shortener solves both halves at once. It bakes the full set of tracking tags into a short, clean, branded link, so attribution travels with every click into your analytics while your audience just sees a tidy link. Need it on a flyer or a table tent? Each link comes with a QR code too.

Put a different short link or QR on each post, ad, email, and text, and your report stops being a guess. It tells you, in plain terms, which campaign brought people in.

Keep it readable: a simple naming habit

Attribution falls apart when every link is named differently. Pick a simple, consistent pattern (source, medium, campaign, lowercase, no spaces) and stick to it. “instagram / social / summer-sale” beats a jumble of one-off names, because six weeks later your report still makes sense.

The quiet part: built to do this right

A couple of details make the difference between a link that helps and one that hurts. Wallet’s short links return a 301, a permanent redirect, which is what search engines want to see, so you keep your SEO value instead of leaking it. And because the destination is only briefly cached, you can change where a printed QR points without reprinting anything. You do not need to know any of this to use it; it is just a sign the tool was built properly.

What to do with the answer

Once you can see which campaign worked, the next move is obvious: put more behind the winners, quietly drop the rest, and tie each result back to the moment in the customer journey it came from. For an even sharper read, point your links at something that also captures the visitor, so you learn not just which campaign drove clicks but which drove sign-ups.

That is the entire point of attribution, and you can have it without a data team or an enterprise platform. It is also part of the free Visitor tier. Want to see which of your links is actually working? Start free and shorten your first one.