Last-Click Attribution

What is Last-Click Attribution?

Attribution Models are becoming more and more important as digital marketing is increasingly gaining relevance. The models used in attribution analysis assign a certain credit for a conversion to the specific channel, making it easier for marketeers to evaluate marketing channels and their performance. As in recent times, the volumes of e-commerce transactions have been soaring and thus the importance of data driven marketing steadily grows, we believe this is an important asset for the future.

Single-Touch vs. Multi-Touch Attribution

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.

Last-click attribution is an attribution model in which 100% of the credit of an online transaction/conversion is awarded to the final touchpoint in the customer journey

Within the context of online marketing and ecommerce, a touchpoint is viewed as a traffic source, e.g. paid search, direct, affiliate etc. Last-click attribution is considered a single-touch attribution method. The binding factor of the different single-touch models is their focus on a singular touchpoint and exclusion of the others.

The first-click attribution model is another widely practiced single-touch attribution method. As the name already suggests, it focuses on the first touchpoint in a customer journey, i.e. the one that starts the interaction with the customer.

What is the Last-Click Attribution Model?

The last-click attribution model is the most commonly practiced attribution model by online marketers. The main reason for its popularity is Google Analytics, which most online marketers use as their main online marketing reporting tool. Google Analytics sets last-click attribution as their default.

Although last-click attribution was extremely useful in the early days of the internet, the model nowadays faces a lot of challenges. As customer journeys become more complex, it becomes increasingly unclear what is driving online conversions for online marketers. And the last-click model is not giving any insight in the touchpoints that led to the last touchpoint whatsoever. Especially top of the funnel marketing efforts suffer from the use of the last-click attribution model.

An alternative to the last-click attribution model (and also all other single-touch attribution models) is multi-touch attribution. In these types of models, value is distributed among the touchpoints so that every touchpoint is credited to some extent.

Within multi-touch attribution, however, many different approaches exist, ranging from linear attribution models (e.g. Linear, First Click Linear or Last Click Linear) to position based attribution models. These could be time decay (i.e., position based) or an U-shaped model, where 40% credit is put to both the first and the last touchpoint, and the remaining 20% are evenly distributed among the others. You can find an overview of all the attribution models in the figure below.

Is this model the right fit for me?

The Last-Click Attribution Model is the right fit for those who want to know which of the touchpoints have the highest influence in the latter and final stages of the customer journey. Which one is the right fit for you, however, comes down to both your business goals and the market it operates in. When applying these attribution models, it is recommended to carefully assess both your key traffic sources, goals and strategies. Think about which channels you primarily use and how you would design your ideal customer journey.

As we explained before, it is becoming increasingly important to consider the entirety of the customer journey and not just a single click. Thus, we recommend to consider multi-touch attribution.

The basic concept of multi-touch attribution over single-touch is, like explained before, to assign value to each touchpoint in the path - thus crediting each with a value that can help assess the value of all channels.

However, as each business is different, the choice of an attribution model ultimately comes down to the business and its operations.

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