One journey, four answers
Take a customer who finds you in four steps. On Monday they read a post found through search. On Wednesday they click a link in your newsletter. On Friday they type your address and buy for $50.
| Model | Who gets the credit |
|---|---|
| First touch | Search, $50 |
| Last touch | Direct, $50 |
| Last non-direct touch | Newsletter, $50 |
| Linear | Search $25, newsletter $25 (or a third each if you count direct) |
Same customer, same $50, different story. None of these is "true". Each is a policy, and you pick the one that answers the question you are asking.
The common models
- First touch credits the visit that found the customer. It answers "what brings new people to us?" and favours search, content and word of mouth.
- Last touch credits the visit just before the sale. It is the easiest to track and tends to favour direct visits and brand searches, which only ever happen after something else did the persuading.
- Last non-direct touch is last touch that ignores direct visits. A direct visit says nothing about how the person found you, so skipping it is usually more useful.
- Multi-touch models spread the credit: evenly (linear), more to recent visits (time decay), or more to the first and last (position-based). They need the whole journey of a person.
- Data-driven models let a vendor's algorithm weigh the steps. They need volume and are hard to check from the outside.
Choosing one
Think about the decision it supports. Deciding where to spend on acquisition points to first touch. Deciding which closing channel to protect points to last non-direct touch. For a small site with a short buying cycle, the models often agree, and the simplest is the right one.
Whatever you pick, apply it the same way every time and say which one a report uses. A change of model moves credit between channels and can look like a change in performance when none happened.
What limits attribution
Attribution can only credit what it can see. If a person looks on a phone and buys on a laptop, two visitors are in the data. If you keep nothing on the device, the model can connect a sale only to a visit from the same day. A link without UTM parameters shared in a private message looks like Direct. Treat the output as a good estimate that is consistent, not as a ledger of what caused what.
In trckable
Each sale is credited to the last non-direct visit within 90 days before it, or to the first touch if you switch the model in the dashboard. A renewal follows the visit that started the subscription. How a sale gets matched to its visit is in the revenue guide.
Try it in trckable
trckable credits each sale to the last non-direct visit within 90 days, or to the first touch if you switch the model, and shows revenue per source. Track revenue
Related terms
Read more
The newsletter
Notes on measuring what matters.
Occasional emails from Albi: new posts, one chart worth reading, what changed in trckable.
We send one email to confirm your address, and nothing more until you confirm. Every newsletter has a link to leave. What we keep, and who sends it: privacy.