An attribution model that gives all conversion credit to the first recorded marketing interaction.
A simple way to identify which channels most often introduce new prospects.
Short and sweet:
An attribution model that gives all conversion credit to the first recorded marketing interaction.
A simple way to identify which channels most often introduce new prospects.
See also: Attribution Model, Last-Touch Attribution, Customer Journey
First-touch attribution credits the very first interaction a customer had with a brand, like the initial ad click or search result that brought them to the site for the first time, with the entire conversion that eventually followed. It’s especially useful for understanding which channels are best at generating initial awareness and pulling in new prospects who weren’t previously familiar with a brand. Like last-touch attribution, its simplicity is also its weakness, since it ignores every touchpoint that happened between that first visit and the eventual purchase, some of which may have mattered just as much.
Under first-touch attribution, if a customer originally discovered a brand through a Pinterest pin months before eventually buying through a direct Google search, that original Pinterest pin gets full credit for the sale.
Marketing teams often use this model specifically to evaluate top-of-funnel channels like display ads and social media, since it highlights what’s actually introducing new people to the brand.
A content marketing team might point to data built this way to justify its blog’s budget, showing that a huge share of eventual customers first arrived by reading an article months before converting.
