First-Touch Attribution: What It Is, How It Works

Attribution, a type of marketing measurement model, is tremendously important for digital marketers, particularly in a crowded, competitive marketplace. Attribution methods assign credit to the various places a potential customer encounters your brand, whether that’s a sponsored social post, a search ad, a dedicated landing page, an email, a keyword, or other possible options.

Attributing proper credit will help you understand which channels are working to bring in new customers at various points in the journey. As customer journeys become less linear, attribution plays a big role, and first-touch attribution can offer important data to marketers about how effective their campaigns are.

What Is First-Touch Attribution?

Generally, attribution in marketing gives credit for conversions to various tactics. First-touch attribution refers to the practice of measuring the channel or format — the touchpoint — where a user first encounters your brand. First-touch attribution assigns full credit for a conversion to the marketing tactic that directly led a user to convert.

For example, if email newsletters are very successful in getting readers to click through to your site or download content, and you’re using first-touch attribution, you would attribute 100% of that conversion to your email program, or to the particular newsletter or series of emails that led to a conversion (however you’ve defined the conversion action).

What first-touch attribution doesn’t include is any other touchpoints that particular user might have encountered. Did they get the newsletter, but also see a sponsored Google ad, or scroll past your brand’s ad on Instagram? With first-touch attribution, you wouldn’t include those in your measurements, such as in your marketing dashboard or in reporting.

How Does First-Touch Attribution Work?

First-touch attribution assumes that the first interaction is paramount to starting the customer’s journey. The reasoning is that the channel or campaign that introduced a customer to your brand plays a huge role in getting that user to take an action or engage in some way. If you can gauge the effectiveness of that first contact using first-touch attribution, you can improve the top-of-funnel awareness strategy accordingly.

There are a few steps:

Choose the initial interaction: What is the very first engagement with your brand?

Give credit: First-touch attribution means all the credit for the conversion goes to that one activity or engagement you identified in step 1. You might use data within an existing measurement platform or add pixels or UTM codes to your owned content to do this.

Analyze the data: Once you’ve gathered enough data, see which channels or tactics are performing best at bringing in prospects, then optimize your marketing plan accordingly.

Why Is First-Touch Attribution Important?

First-touch attribution still plays a role in modern digital marketing because it’s useful for understanding the early part of the customer journey. You can easily see, using first-touch attribution, which channels and messaging are most effective at bringing in new prospects and building engagement at the early stages.

First-touch attribution can be useful for certain types of companies or at certain places in developing marketing strategies, including:

New Companies

When you’re just starting to build a brand and fill the top of your funnel, first-touch attribution can be really useful and help you understand where to invest marketing resources as you grow. Plus, if you’re limited in data analytics tools or budget, first-touch can give you solid data points to guide strategy and investment.

Short Sales Cycles or Low Sales

A short sales cycle means the first touch can have oversized importance to getting a user to convert and purchase. Companies with high conversions and low sales can use first-touch attribution to see where users are particularly interested in your offerings.

Demand Generation Focus

Companies focused on creating demand can see quickly which first touch is bringing in prospects to cut out unnecessary channels or tactics.

Benefits of First-Touch Attribution

First-touch attribution brings benefits even as marketing measurements and strategies have grown more sophisticated. These are the benefits to keep in mind:

Simplicity

First-touch measurement is straightforward, focusing only on when your prospect first engaged with your brand. It’s easy to gauge and easy to report and present to other teams. It’s also easy to see what’s working quickly if you know which tactics are immediately interesting to your target audience, then fine-tune or double down on those tactics.

Importance

The first time someone engages with your brand is arguably the key moment in capturing attention in a busy landscape. Today’s web users are bombarded with messages, offers, and asks for their time and attention. You can’t move users through the funnel if you don’t get them into the funnel in the first place.

Limitations and Drawbacks of First-Touch Attribution

Lack of Complexity

A first-touch attribution model doesn’t take into account the multiple channels that prospects are using, or the potential complexity of a user journey. A B2B journey has an average of eight touchpoints, and a B2C journey six, according to HubSpot.

Lack of Valuable Data

If you only measure the first touch in your attribution model, you’re likely missing out on a lot of data that can tell a broader story about what users are looking for. It’s also digital-only, missing out on in-store visits, sales calls, or other more offline tactics.

Overly Linear

Digital customer journeys are increasingly complex, and user fatigue means that prospects are quick to click away. First-touch attribution may have been more effective in an earlier era, but its assumptions of a linear path can now leave out a lot of important data points.

First-Touch Attribution Use Cases

If you’re expanding to a new audience, marketing a new product, or simply building your business’ marketing program, first-touch attribution can be especially useful. When you’re choosing this model, consider what insights you want to capture and what goals you’re trying to reach. Think about using first-touch attribution for the following types of companies and marketing strategies:

Establishing a New Channel

Say, for example, you’re starting out with LinkedIn, whether with organic company posts, paid ads, or both. First-touch attribution can help you see if and how often LinkedIn is bringing new visitors to your brand, so you can then decide whether to continue investing in the channel (or adjust spending up or down).

Building an Audience

For a new business, or an established business expanding into a new product line or industry, first-touch attribution can show you how visitors are finding your brand or new line of business. Your assumptions may be different from reality, so capturing and examining this data can help guide your broader brand marketing strategy.

Narrowing Down Options

If you have some guesses as to which channels might perform best to start filling the top of the funnel, but not a lot of cash on hand, try a first-touch attribution model. You can use the data gathered to see which channel is most cost-effective at bringing in prospects.

First-Touch Attribution vs. Other Attribution Models

There are a variety of potential attribution models to employ beyond first-touch attribution, and you may use options in different scenarios for different reasons. Here’s an overview:

Last-Touch Attribution

The opposite of first-touch attribution, last-touch attribution gives full conversion credit to the last touchpoint before a user takes a conversion action, including a purchase or subscription. When you’re deeply focused on the middle and lower parts of the funnel, such as for performance marketing teams, last-touch attribution can offer valuable information. The downside of this option is that it doesn’t capture the influence of other touchpoints on the user’s journey toward or after conversion, cutting out nurture efforts as well as loyalty or advocacy activities.

Multi-Touch Attribution

Multi-touch attribution is perhaps the most balanced, comprehensive option for digital marketers. It’s a way to see holistically where users engaged with your brand, from first touch all the way to last, and to use that aggregated data to tailor your strategy. You can see, for example, which content works best to drive a user further into the funnel, or if there’s a common tactic that’s most commonly seen just before a purchase. You can distribute the credit as percentages to make future decisions about what to prioritize. Multi-touch attribution is, however, the hardest to implement, requiring data science expertise and high-quality data, and it’s still an emerging field.

Within multi-touch attribution, there are a few variations:

Linear Attribution

This option distributes the credit for a conversion across every touchpoint in the journey.

Time-Decay Attribution

This attribution model gives more credit to those user interactions that are closer to the conversion point.

Position-Based Attribution

This type of multi-touch attribution gives credit to first and last touchpoints, then distributes the remaining credit across the interactions in the middle.

Tools and Technologies for First-Touch Attribution

As first-touch attribution is fairly straightforward and has been used for many years, there are a variety of ways to capture this data, some of which you might be using already:

 Analytics Platforms

You can use your existing analytics platforms to set up and use a first-touch attribution model. For example, Google Analytics lets you set this up in its Advertising section within the “Conversion Paths” report. You can set the time frame (up to 90 days back) and channel grouping, then explore and share the reported data. (Consider exploring other attribution models in this way, too.)

 Performance Marketing Platforms

Modern performance marketing platforms should include multiple attribution models so you can test them and choose which ones work for which goals and audiences. These platforms also offer different conversion attribution types, such as click-through and view-through, for greater granularity. First-touch attribution within performance marketing software offers a simple way to see which top-funnel channels are most effective.

Marketing Automation Software

Use marketing automation software for first-touch attribution by matching data on initial touchpoints with conversion data, to see where users first encountered your brand (perhaps taking advantage of CRM integration). Marketing automation tools usually capture customer interactions across channels with pixels and UTM codes, and can identify the first customer interaction. Set the software to assign credit for conversions to the first touches you’ve identified and then explore the resulting reports.

CRM Systems

Some CRM systems, including HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Demandbase, offer first-touch attribution features that you can try. The CRM’s data can show at which initial touchpoint a prospect first engaged with your brand. It’s an easy way to view data that you already have in-house, then explore it further to make optimizations.

How First-Touch Attribution Contributes to Marketing ROI

Overall ROI

Use the data you gather from first-touch attribution to connect touchpoints to conversions and prove or disprove their impact on overall marketing ROI. If a channel is performing well for first-touch attribution, you can tie revenue directly to that particular channel.

Budget Allocation

Since first-touch attribution tracks and connects customer actions with your campaigns and tactics, you can easily see what’s successfully driving the first touch, then invest more in those areas, or stop investing in the areas that aren’t performing.

When and Where to Use First-Touch Marketing Attribution

It’s likely you’ll use a variety of attribution models to grow the business. Use first-touch marketing attribution to understand which of your top-of-funnel marketing tactics is succeeding. So, you could apply first-touch attribution to understand if more users are finding your brand through organic search keywords, sponsored social posts, or a sponsored search term. If you’re unsure which of these is working best, put first-touch attribution into place to gather the data on performance and engagement by channel.

First-Touch Attribution in a Privacy-Centric World

Regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and others bring challenges for marketers. There’s a lot of adapting necessary to safely and securely capture marketing data while following the laws and respecting user privacy. These regulations can limit what data you collect: For example, you should use aggregated data analysis and statistical modeling to understand how first-touch attribution is working, rather than gathering specific user data, which now requires consent.

Key Takeaways

First-touch attribution credits the first digital action, and no others, when measuring marketing effectiveness. It’s useful to understand how users are interacting with your brand and getting into the funnel, but also brings limitations in gauging the full picture of how digital tactics are working. Choose first-touch attribution to spur demand generation efforts, build the top of the funnel, or alongside other attribution models to optimize your brand-building efforts.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

When is first-touch attribution most effective?

First-touch attribution is very effective when you’re trying to understand how users are finding your business and when you’re looking to build awareness. With first-touch attribution data, you can tailor top-of-funnel activities and decide how much budget to put into them. You might use first-touch attribution more heavily when you’re expanding your audience, building a new business, or trying to fill the top of the funnel for better eventual results down-funnel.

How does first-touch attribution compare to last-click attribution?

These two approaches to marketing attribution are nearly opposites, and which you use will depend on your business and overall approach to capturing user journey information. First-touch attribution looks at the initial way a user engaged with your business, while last-click or last-touch attribution looks at the final way a user engaged with your business before converting. You may use both of these approaches in tandem or employ them separately, depending on your business’ goals.

Can first-touch attribution be used with multi-touch attribution?

Yes, these approaches can be used in a hybrid way to understand the breakdown of where and how users are finding and engaging with your brand. Multi-touch attribution can encompass first-touch attribution, but depending on the maturity of your multi-touch attribution efforts, you might use both together as you’re building out analytics capabilities.

What data is needed to accurately track first-touch attribution?

If you’ve decided to employ first-touch attribution in your marketing efforts, you’ll want to set it up correctly. This measurement model requires solid implementation and data points that capture whatever you’ve decided is the first touch or initial interaction. This might include data on website visits, social media engagement, CRM system data, email open rates and click-throughs, and more. With cookies becoming less used, you’ll probably use UTM codes and/or website pixels for associated tracking.

Is first-touch attribution suitable for all businesses?

First-touch attribution has a variety of applications. It might not be ideal for every business, but many businesses will use first-touch attribution occasionally or for a particular metrics area. Some industries may use it more than others, such as those with quick sales cycles, those that depend highly on generating an outsized amount of demand, or businesses like e-commerce with short sales cycles.