Bottom of funnel
Partnerships with the attribution agreed up front.
Both sides of a partnership can plausibly claim the same lead, and both report it to their own leadership. A written attribution agreement, settled before launch, is what keeps the two reports from disagreeing and the relationship from absorbing that argument.
This page covers direct, negotiated relationships between two specific businesses — referrals, co-marketing, or a joint offer — where both sides agree how a shared conversion gets attributed before the relationship starts. A commission program run through a shared network's tracked links and cookies, paid per attributed sale at a scale where individual relationships are managed by exception, is a different arrangement, covered as affiliate marketing. A partnership depends on one relationship being managed well; an affiliate program depends on a network being managed well.
Two businesses refer customers to each other, and both walk away from that relationship believing it produced a specific number of leads. Both numbers get reported up to each business's own leadership as evidence the partnership is working. The problem shows up the first time anyone compares the two reports directly and finds they do not agree, because neither side wrote down, before any of this started, exactly which touch counts as the referral.
That gap is not a tracking failure to be patched with better software. It is a missing agreement, and the fix is writing one before the relationship launches rather than negotiating it in the middle of a dispute over a specific lead both sides want credit for. The service here is as much the written agreement as anything technical sitting behind it.
How the work differs
- Attribution agreement
- A written document, signed before launch, defining exactly which touch counts as the referral source when both sides could plausibly claim a lead.
- Referral tracking
- A shared method for logging a referral at first contact — a code, a form field, a dedicated phone line — regardless of whether it arrives online, by phone, or in person.
- Reconciliation cadence
- Both sides' lead lists compared against each other on a fixed schedule, with disputed leads resolved against the written agreement's rules.
- Co-marketing scope
- Joint campaigns, content, or events scoped and approved by both parties before launch, with cost-sharing terms set in the same agreement.
- Performance review
- The relationship reviewed against agreed volume and quality benchmarks on a recurring schedule, with either side able to trigger a renegotiation.
- Exit terms
- What happens to shared data, active referrals, and co-branded material if the partnership ends, defined in the original agreement.
How it is measured
A referral counts once it matches the rule set in the attribution agreement, applied the same way regardless of which side happened to log it first. That reconciled figure feeds the same attribution layer used across every other program, so a partnership's real contribution is judged on the same terms as a fully digital channel's, despite depending on records that are sometimes kept by hand.
What this channel cannot claim credit for: a lead the partner agreement's own rules attribute to the other side, even where this business's team believes their own outreach mattered too. Absorbing that discipline is the price of having a rule that resolves disputes at all instead of relitigating each one.
What we need from you
Whoever has authority to sign on behalf of the business, since a partnership without a signature from someone empowered to commit to the terms is not actually settled, whatever an account manager on the phone agreed to. A record of how referrals currently get logged today, if anything, so the tracking method builds on what already exists rather than replacing a habit staff have already adopted. And a named person on your team who owns the relationship day to day, since a partnership with no single owner on either side is where reconciliation disputes tend to linger unresolved.
Who this is for
Built for operators with one or a few specific, known partner relationships worth managing individually rather than through a network, part of the bottom-of-funnel lineup — multi-location healthcare groups built on referring-physician relationships are a common case, since a specialist practice's referral volume from a handful of specific providers is exactly the kind of relationship an informal handshake arrangement eventually strains under. It pairs with marketing operations, since referral reconciliation depends on the same lead-matching discipline applied everywhere else, and with organic capture where a local co-marketing partner's audience overlaps with a location's own service area. Client results show a finished attribution agreement next to the reconciliation record it produced.
A short written agreement, signed by both sides before the partnership launches, that states exactly which touch counts as the referral source when a lead could plausibly be claimed by either party — first contact, a specific code or form, or whichever party's material the customer engaged with last. Getting this in writing before any leads exist matters because agreeing on a rule in the abstract is far easier than agreeing on it after a specific, valuable lead is already in dispute.
The written agreement resolves it, not a conversation between account managers trying to be fair in the moment. Both parties' lead records are reconciled against each other on a fixed schedule, and any lead both sides logged gets attributed according to the rule set in the agreement, applied the same way every time regardless of which side would prefer a different answer for that specific case.
A dedicated phone number or a specific question built into intake — "how did you hear about us" — captured consistently rather than left to whoever happens to be answering that day. It is less precise than a digital click, so referral partnerships accept a higher share of judgment-based attribution than a channel with a clean tracked link, and the agreement specifies how disputed or ambiguous cases get resolved.
Terms vary by relationship — a flat referral fee, a percentage of the resulting business, reciprocal referrals with no cash changing hands, or a shared cost for a joint campaign. What matters more than the specific structure is that it is documented in the same agreement that defines attribution, so pricing and attribution never end up governed by two different, potentially conflicting understandings.
When the relationship is with one or a handful of specific, known businesses worth managing individually — a referring specialist, a complementary local business, a co-marketing partner with an overlapping audience. An affiliate program makes more sense once the goal is reaching many partners at scale through a shared network, where individual relationships are managed by exception rather than negotiated one at a time.
Get the attribution agreement written before your next partnership launches.
A one-page attribution agreement template, adapted to your specific partner relationship, defining exactly how a shared lead gets credited.