Glossary
Attribution
The rules that decide which click, channel or affiliate gets credit for a conversion. In affiliate programs the advertiser's attribution settings determine whether you get paid, and they can differ from what your tracker shows.
Also called: conversion attribution, attribution model, sales attribution.
Every party counts in its own way. The network credits the affiliate whose click falls inside the cookie window, usually the most recent one. The advertiser deduplicates against its other channels and may void your sale if a paid search click came later. Google Ads offers only data-driven and last-click models, and your tracker credits whatever click carried the ID that came back in the postback.
The catch is that the advertiser's version is the one that pays, and its rules sit in the program terms you accepted. Etsy, for example, pays no commission when the buyer's last click was paid. Read the attribution and deduplication clauses before you send traffic, and keep your own click logs: when numbers disagree in a dispute, sub IDs and timestamps are your evidence.
Related terms: Last-click attribution, Cookie window, Postback, Click ID, Tracker.