Attribution for mail campaigns: giving credit carefully, and admitting what you can't know

Attribution is the argument about which channel gets credit for a customer. With direct mail the argument is harder than usual, because a mail piece can't be clicked. Someone reads a postcard on Tuesday, searches the business name on Friday and fills in a web form. Unless you planned for it, organic search gets the credit.

This section covers the methods that make that argument more honest: holdout groups that get no mail, matchback analysis against the mailing list, comparisons between mailed and unmailed zip codes, and source questions at intake. We cover the limits of each one too. A matchback shows overlap, not cause. A holdout needs enough volume to mean anything.

Iwantrackcards doesn't treat correlation as proof. When we say a campaign drove something, we'll say how we know. When we don't know, we'll say that instead, which is usually the more useful answer for the analysts and CRM managers who have to defend the report.