Attribution vs. Incremental Lift
Attribution counts revenue that occurred alongside an intervention; incremental lift counts only the revenue that would not have occurred without it.
Attribution is straightforward to calculate: a cart saw an intervention, the cart converted, so the resulting revenue is attributed to that intervention. It answers "how much revenue is associated with this mechanism."
Incremental lift is a harder, counterfactual question: of the revenue attributed to an intervention, how much of it would have converted anyway even if the shopper had never seen it? Some shoppers who see an offer were always going to complete their purchase — the intervention didn't change their outcome, it just happened to be present when they did.
The only reliable way to estimate incremental lift is to compare shoppers who saw the intervention against a comparable group who didn't — a holdout group — and measure the difference in conversion between the two. Attribution alone can't distinguish a shopper who was persuaded from a shopper who was already going to buy.
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