First Click Attribution

What is first click attribution?

First-click attribution is an attribution model in which 100% of the credit of an online transaction/conversion is awarded to the first touchpoint in the customer journey. It is also known as first-touch and first-interaction.

What is attribution?

Each time a user visits your site, they come from somewhere, by clicking on a search result link or clicking through an ad or even directly typing the URL to your site. These are known as marketing channels. Knowing where your traffic comes from, and where the valuable traffic comes from, is key to valuing your marketing strategy and to understanding your users. This is called attribution, you can learn more about it here and here.

What are touchpoints?

Touchpoints in the context of online marketing and eCommerce, are viewed as a traffic source, e.g. direct, display ads, organic search etc. First-click attribution is regarded as a single-touch attribution method.

What makes a single-touch model is the focus on a singular touchpoint and exclusion of the others touchpoints in their assignment of attribution. Due to Google Analytics the last-click attribution model is superior in popularity and practiced significantly more than the first-click model.

The first-click attribution model only rewards the initiating touchpoint that led to a conversion and is therefore a strategy to pinpoint sources that are effective in the top of the funnel.

Single-Touch vs. Multi-Touch Attribution

Like said before single touch attribution assigns credit to only a single touchpoint in a customer journey. This means that only a single touchpoint is considered within this path. This is inefficient since a customer journey typically consists of multiple touchpoints that each ultimately contribute their share to the conversion.

The advantage of multi-touch attribution is that not only one, but all the touchpoints within a customer journey are considered. This lets you pinpoint the most effective traffic sources that you are using and thus determine where you should allocate your marketing budget to, and where not to.

Why is first click important?

First click attribution is critically important because it tells you how customers initialy heard about your site. This first encounter is key, since it raised awareness of your brand. So when should you use the first-click attribution?

First-click attribution is a great way to measure your marketing effectiveness. But, you do end up losing visibility of how later touchpoints affect your customer journey. Let’s quickly recap the customer journey stages.

The first is the awareness stage, where the user is looking for a solution to a problem they’re having (top of the funnel). This is a fact-finding and information-gathering stage.

Next, is the consideration stage (middle of the funnel). The user will likely now have a list of providers that they’re considering purchasing from.

Lastly, is the decision stage (bottom of the funnel). This is where a user converts into a customer. You can read more about how to attack these stages in our linked funnel marketing articles.

With first-click attribution, you only get visibility of how your channels are working to drive the awareness stage of your customer journey. Depending on what you want this can be perfect for your situation.

What do you want to achieve?

If you’re just starting out with attribution, then first-click is a great option. Single-touch attribution models allow you to get grips with arguably the most important touchpoints in the customer journey.

Multi-touch attribution will give you more insight, but it’s a lot more data to comb through and make sense of too. But with it in place, you can better understand the roles channels play together, as opposed to just on their own.

Attribution models allow you to answer complex questions regarding your marketing, and make sense of complex and convoluted data.

Learn more about us

In case you want to find out more about digital marketing or attribution, make sure to check out our blog or our other academy posts. You can also schedule a demo and start experiencing it for yourself!