What is last-touch attribution and is it giving you the whole picture?
The customer journey is no longer a simple, linear path from awareness to conversion.
From the first exposure to the final click before purchase, customers engage with businesses through various channels, devices, and platforms. Each of these touchpoints plays a unique role in shaping the customer’s perception, preference, and ultimately their decision to convert.
With this shift in consumer behavior, you may need to reevaluate your attribution strategies and seek more comprehensive models that account for the multiple interactions a customer has with a brand before converting.
This blog will explore how last-touch attribution works, its benefits and pitfalls, and which marketing attribution model might be a better choice.
How does last-touch attribution work?
Last-touch attribution is a marketing measurement model that assigns 100% of the credit for a conversion or sale to a customer’s last interaction with a brand before making a purchase. This model operates on the principle that the final touchpoint—clicking an ad, visiting a website, or engaging with an email—is the decisive factor in the customer’s decision to convert.
What’s the difference between last-touch and last-click attribution?
Last-touch and last-click attribution are often used interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference between the two.
Last-click attribution specifically refers to the last clicked ad or link that led to a conversion. For example, if a customer clicks on a search ad and makes a purchase, the conversion is attributed to that search ad.
Last-touch attribution, on the other hand, considers the last touchpoint, which could be a click or a non-click interaction, such as viewing a video, before the conversion.
In essence, last-click is a subset of last-touch attribution.
What are the benefits of using last-touch attribution?
When used judiciously and in conjunction with key performance metrics, the last-touch attribution model can provide valuable insights and serve specific purposes. Explore some of the advantages of last-touch attribution.
Offers simplicity and ease of implementation
One of the primary benefits of last-touch attribution is its simplicity. It’s pretty uncomplicated to understand and implement, making it an easy starting point for businesses new to attribution modeling.
Helps identify high-impact final touchpoints
Last-touch attribution can help you identify the most effective touchpoints driving immediate conversions. By focusing on the final interaction before a conversion occurs, you can pinpoint the channels and tactics that are most successful at pushing prospects over the finish line. This information can be valuable for optimizing lower-funnel marketing efforts, such as retargeting campaigns or abandoned cart emails.
Where does last-touch attribution fall short?
As much as last-touch attribution seems like a simple model to implement, at its core, last-touch attribution operates on a flawed premise. It assumes that the final touchpoint before a conversion is the only one that matters, ignoring all the crucial interactions that led the customer to that point. This oversimplification often paints an incomplete and misleading picture of your marketing performance.
Let’s explain with an example. Imagine you’re the CMO of a thriving e-commerce company. Your marketing team has been running a multi-channel campaign that includes social media, emails, display ads, and search ads—all aimed at driving sales and increasing brand awareness.
Upon reviewing the performance data in your analytics platform, you notice that search ads and retargeting campaigns consistently show the highest last-click ROI. Based on this insight, you allocate more budget to these high-performing channels while cutting spending on upper-funnel tactics like social media marketing and offline display ads.
A month later, you observe a puzzling trend. Despite the increased investment in search and retargeting, overall conversions have declined, and customer acquisition costs have skyrocketed. Organic traffic has also taken a hit, and your brand’s social media engagement has plummeted.
This is the problem with last-touch attribution. By focusing solely on the final touchpoint before conversion, you’ve overlooked the crucial role of upper-funnel activities in driving brand awareness, consideration, and ultimately product sales.
The search and display ads sparked initial awareness, the social media posts lent credibility, and the retargeted email campaigns provided valuable information. Each touchpoint played a crucial role in moving the customer down the funnel, yet last-touch attribution fails to account for all these critical early and mid-funnel interactions.
What happens when you neglect the rest of the sales funnel?
As illustrated above, focusing solely on the bottom of the funnel and relying on last-touch attribution can lead marketers down a dangerous path. Here’s a closer look at some of the pitfalls of neglecting the full customer journey.
Lack of awareness and pipeline growth
By neglecting the top of the funnel, you miss the impact of building brand awareness and attracting new potential customers. Imagine a funnel that only focuses on the narrow end; it restricts the flow of new prospects. Without efforts to draw in new audiences at the top, the number of potential customers dwindles over time, making it harder to achieve long-term growth. This is even more true for offline conversions.
For example, consider a multi-location spa chain launching a brand-new service through a comprehensive digital marketing campaign. The primary goal is to increase foot traffic and inquiries about the new service across all locations. The marketing team runs various awareness-building efforts, like social media promotions, influencer partnerships, content marketing, display advertising, and targeted email campaigns.
However, with last-touch attribution, all conversions would be credited solely to the final touchpoint—perhaps a local search, a retargeted ad, a promotional email, or a map listing—ignoring the critical role played by earlier awareness-building efforts. This narrow focus fails to capture the true impact of the broader marketing strategy, potentially leading to undervaluing crucial top-of-funnel activities that initiate the customer journey and drive long-term business growth.
Tunnel vision on immediate conversions
Last-touch attribution emphasizes tactics that drive immediate sales, like discount codes or flash sales. While these can boost short-term results, they ignore the importance of engaging and nurturing leads through the buying process.
The vicious cycle of underinvestment
When marketing budgets are allocated based solely on last-touch data, upper-funnel activities like social media engagement or content marketing that contribute significantly to brand awareness might receive less credit than they deserve.
This could lead to a misallocation of resources, where only the channels that appear at the end of the funnel receive adequate funding. This creates a vicious cycle—less investment leads to fewer new prospects, leading to even less investment. Over time, this shrinks the pool of potential customers and stunts growth.
Vulnerability to market shifts
Relying heavily on a few bottom-funnel tactics makes a brand vulnerable to changes in customer behavior or market conditions. For instance, if a major advertising platform changes its algorithm, the tactics that once drove quick conversions might suddenly become less effective. A full-funnel approach provides a diversified strategy that can adapt more easily to such changes.
Missed opportunities for lifetime value
Focusing only on the final sale ignores the potential for building long-term customer relationships. Once a sale is made, continued engagement through email marketing, loyalty programs, and excellent customer service can lead to repeat purchases, upsells, and referrals. By neglecting these opportunities, brands miss out on maximizing each customer’s lifetime value.
Multi-touch attribution: the better alternative to last touch
The limitations of last-touch attribution may have you looking for a more comprehensive solution, and you’re not alone. Many marketers are now moving to better attribution models that help them understand all the performance metrics and trace the buyer’s journey through every step.
While there are various last-touch attribution alternatives available, multi-touch attribution (MTA) is arguably the best replacement.
MTA aims to paint a more complete picture of the buyer’s journey by assigning fractional conversion credit to each touchpoint along the way. This could give equal credit to all the marketing touchpoints or consider a custom credit system based on the campaign performance metrics, long-term business goals, market dynamics, and other considerations.
The true power of multi-touch attribution lies in translating insights into action. Armed with a more holistic view of performance, marketers can make informed, data-driven decisions to improve their results.
Here are some key ways multi-touch attribution can make a positive impact.
Maximize your marketing dollars
Multi-touch attribution empowers marketers to allocate budgets effectively across channels. Analyzing each touchpoint’s performance lets you pinpoint which channels deliver the highest ROI at various funnel stages. This approach ensures every dollar is optimized for conversions, enabling strategic resource allocation that aligns with your business goals.
Get a granular view of customer touchpoints
MTA allows for a more granular analysis of the customer journey, revealing the complex interplay between various channels, devices, and touchpoints. This level of insight is particularly valuable in today’s multi-device, multi-channel landscape, where consumers engage with brands across numerous platforms from different devices before making a purchase. By understanding how these interactions work together to drive conversions, marketers can create more seamless, personalized experiences that resonate with their target audience.
Find what resonates and fine-tune it
With insights from multi-touch attribution, you can identify which creative assets resonate at each funnel stage. This data-driven approach helps refine your marketing materials, ensuring future campaigns are based on proven success. By continuously optimizing your creative elements, you enhance engagement and drive higher conversion rates.
Optimize strategies based on customer segment
MTA reveals which audience segments respond best to specific messaging at each touchpoint. By refining your targeting strategies, you can engage the right audiences more effectively. Additionally, MTA visualizes common conversion paths, helping you spot friction points that slow the sales cycle. Addressing these obstacles accelerates conversions and improves the overall customer experience.
Eliminate siloed operations
Multi-touch attribution also promotes greater alignment and collaboration across marketing teams. With a shared, data-driven view of performance, teams can collaborate more effectively to create cohesive, customer-centric experiences. Silos break down as everyone rallies around a common goal—optimizing the full-funnel journey.
How to transition from last-touch to multi-touch attribution model
To transition from last-touch to multi-touch attribution (MTA), follow these practical steps:
- Audit your current attribution setup in your analytics platform, like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics.
- Ensure all touchpoints are properly tracked with Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters or tracking codes—to identify the source, medium, campaign, and other details of website traffic. This allows you to track the effectiveness of different marketing channels and touchpoints.
- Implement cross-device tracking to capture user journeys across devices. For example, in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you can turn on Google Signals to start tracking the cross-device journeys. This uses data from signed-in users to identify and connect user journeys across multiple devices.
- Set up the desired lookback window and MTA model.
- Create a comprehensive mapping of your customer journey, including all online and offline touchpoints. Use tools like Hotjar or Mixpanel to visualize user flows.
- Integrate your CRM data with your attribution platform to include offline touchpoints and sales interactions in your MTA model.
- Set up custom attribution reports in your analytics platform to compare the impact of different touchpoints and channels on key metrics.
- Use the insights from your MTA reports to optimize your marketing approach. Reallocate budgets toward high-performing channels and tactics identified by your MTA model.
- Continuously monitor and refine your MTA setup. Regularly review your attribution models and adjust them based on changes in your customer journey or business objectives.
Setting the standard: how Yelp supports multi-touch attribution
Yelp recognizes the limitations of last-touch attribution and suggests a more holistic approach to keeping track of every prospect’s journey, right from the first click or view.
Yelp can help you create a custom MTA approach that makes sense for you based on your customer, industries, and operational preferences—even when part of the customer journey exists outside of Yelp… This means that if a user is exposed to a Yelp ad, leaves the platform, and later returns to the client’s website to complete a transaction within the set window, you can still capture and attribute that conversion to the ad campaign.
While there are different ways to set up tracking for accurate attribution, Yelp offers a few simple ways.
How can you track conversions with Yelp?
There are three different ways you can track such conversions within Yelp. You can either use Yelp’s first-party measurement tools or leverage a third-party vendor we work with.
- Pixel-based approach
Yelp uses a pixel-based approach to track various online conversions—like orders, form fills, bookings, inquiries, and user sign-ups, across multiple touchpoints—even when they happen outside Yelp. By placing the Yelp pixel on your website across all landing pages and other important pages like ordering pages, services pages, and product description pages, you can track user behavior and interactions more thoroughly.
When a user sees an ad on Yelp, a pixel captures the event. As the user interacts with your website, the pixel tracks actions like page views, form fills, and transactions. This data is sent to Yelp’s system for analysis to understand the impact of each touchpoint on the user’s path to conversion.
- Conversions API
Yelp offers a Conversions API, which matches Yelp’s first-party data to yours so that you can track all conversions, even offline ones.
The Conversions API works by sending conversion data from your system to Yelp, where it is matched with Yelp’s user data. This allows you to attribute conversions to specific Yelp ads, even if the conversion occurred offline or through a different channel.
- Collaborate with vendors
Yelp collaborates with various third-party vendors to support and enhance your MTA model, which you can use for comprehensive tracking and attribution.
By working with these vendors, you can integrate Yelp data with your existing attribution models and gain a holistic view of your customer journey. This collaboration allows you to identify where prospects move through your sales funnel, where they drop off, and when they return.
By collecting data on both converting and non-converting paths, Yelp’s tracking system can build a comprehensive picture of how users interact with ads and websites and its influence on the final conversion—giving you everything you need to tweak and fine-tune the customer journey.
Make every interaction count
While simple to set up and understand, last-touch attribution has significant drawbacks for marketers. Its biggest flaw is that it ignores the wider customer journey and gives full credit to the final touchpoint before conversion.
In contrast, multi-touch attribution assigns fractional credit to each touchpoint based on its role in driving the conversion. This allows marketers to understand the impact and ROI of their channels, marketing campaigns, and tactics across the full funnel.
To learn more about driving brand awareness and attracting more people to the top of your sales funnel, check out these crucial awareness stage marketing strategies.