When a customer finally buys from you, which piece of marketing gets the credit?
This question sounds simple, but your answer determines where you put your budget next month — which means getting it wrong costs real money.
The problem: most journeys have multiple steps
A typical customer might discover you through a Facebook ad on Tuesday, ignore it. Then they see a sponsored newsletter mention on Thursday, click through, and read your pricing page. Then on Sunday, they Google your brand name directly and sign up.
So... which channel gets the sale? The Facebook ad? The newsletter? The Google search? All three? They all played a role.
This is what attribution models try to answer.
First-touch attribution
First-touch gives 100% of the credit to the very first interaction. In the example above, Facebook gets all the credit. The newsletter and the Google search get nothing.
This model is great if you care about measuring which channels are introducing new people to your brand. It's terrible for understanding what actually closes the sale.
Last-touch attribution
Last-touch gives 100% of the credit to the very last interaction. In our example, Google Search gets all of it. The Facebook ad that started the whole journey gets zero.
This is actually the default in many analytics tools. It's easy to calculate but systematically undervalues every channel that does early-stage awareness work. If you optimize based on last-touch, you'll probably end up cutting budget from the top-of-funnel campaigns that were feeding your pipeline the whole time.
Why neither one tells the full story
Both models force you to pick a winner in a situation where multiple channels all contributed. That's a simplification that leads to bad decisions.
What most mature marketing teams use instead is some form of multi-touch attribution — a model that distributes credit across the whole journey. The most common versions are linear (split it equally), time-decay (the closer to the sale, the more credit), and position-based (first and last get a bigger share, middle touchpoints get less).
Multi-touch requires you to track every touchpoint, not just the last click. That's where good link tracking infrastructure pays for itself.
gometrify gives you server-side click logs for every link across every channel — the raw material you need to see the full customer journey. Create your free account →