It’s Time To Quit Last Touch Attribution

Enough is Enough. You deserve better than the worst attribution model.

Imagine you’re watching a fantastic play in soccer. The ball starts in the goalie’s hands. It’s perfectly thrown to another player down the field who deftly passes it through his opponent. Despite heavy defense, the midfielders weave the ball through opponents with a series of precise passes and graceful maneuvering. Seconds later the ball finds its way to the edge of the box. With just a glance, the forward executes a masterful kick, launching the ball over the defenders to a teammate, who bicycle kicks it into the net. How do you assign credit for this moment of triumph? If you’re picking up on the injustice of overlooking teamwork and the strategic plays leading up to that breathtaking goal, you can see how Last Touch Attribution actively misinforms your marketing analytics.

What Is Last Touch Attribution?

Last touch attribution measures the success of your marketing efforts based on the last thing a user does before achieving the goal. Using the soccer analogy, it would assign all credit to the final player who kicked the ball into the goal and dismiss anything that happened before. It’s the easiest attribution model to set up, takes the least amount of information into account, and can give you simple answers. While that might work if you sell “instant gratification” products in a single interaction, most B2B businesses need at least 8 consistent touch points before reaching a sale, meaning a last touch attribution model ignores 87% of your marketing efforts. If you’re not sure what attribution model you’re using (or if the people responsible for your tracking hide behind a smoke screen), see if they can answer the following questions:

• Which social posts are driving users through the top of the funnel?

• What platforms create return users?

• What is the ROI for SEO content?

Why is Last Touch Attribution Bad?

Because the inaccurate results drive bad decision making. By keeping the sole focus on what steps a user takes right before conversion, your model will only tell you how to improve or change the last step of (what should be) a lengthy process. Last Touch Attribution doesn’t care about a larger strategy that might include increasing the quality of your traffic, better educating interested users, or creating more engagement on your organic social media posts. This undervalues crucial early-stage marketing efforts like content marketing, social media engagement, and SEO, which make the difference in the awareness and consideration stages.

Does Attribution Really Matter?

Absolutely. Understanding how your marketing succeeds is one of the only ways to consistently win online. You need to know how ads win, which elements of your marketing support your wins, and how much you should invest in every touchpoint. Accurate attribution can give you those crucial insights across your entire marketing funnel. Without it, you might know how much business you’re getting but never really understand why. Attribution sheds light on the customer journey, highlighting which channels and messages resonate most with your audience. It empowers you to allocate budget optimally, doubling down on what works and minimizing the parts that don’t. That ability to adapt and refine your marketing strategy based on your attribution model isn't just useful; it's a baseline requirement to compete online.

What Should I Use Instead of Last Touch Attribution?

Here’s where things get complicated. While there are a lot of different data driven attribution models, the most important question goes back to the soccer game: how do you want to divide credit for a team effort? Lodestone Strategies typically prefers a modified Shapley approach, which treats every step of marketing as a cohesive team and assigns credit for how each element supports a conversion. As users take different steps to the final goal (become a client, make a purchase, etc.), the model evaluates how each part of the marketing strategy encourages or discourages the user. While it takes a lot of effort to integrate data from social media platforms, ads, and website analytics, the payoff is more than worth it. Comprehensive attribution allows you to optimize every step of the customer journey and diagnose exactly where problems arise. You can not only tell you where and how to optimize your marketing, but a powerful enough model can even make accurate predictions for how future campaigns will perform.