Why Attribution Models Matter: A Real Example From a Small E-Commerce Brand

Alex Fusco
Alex Fusco
October 09, 2025
Why Attribution Models Matter: A Real Example From a Small E-Commerce Brand
When it comes to understanding which marketing channels actually drive revenue, the attribution model you choose can make a big difference. To illustrate this, we analyzed two weeks of data from a small e-commerce brand using two different attribution models: multi-touch attribution and last-touch attribution.
The results highlight how revenue distribution can shift significantly depending on the model you use. For larger brands over longer time frames, these differences can become even more pronounced.


Multi-Touch vs. Last-Touch Attribution: What’s the Difference?


  • Last-Touch Attribution gives 100% of the credit to the final channel a customer interacted with before purchasing. The last touch model will provide all the credit for any order to the last touchpoint in a conversion path. The last touch model is a great way of looking at your bottom of the funnel conversions. This model gives you a clear look into which marketing touchpoints are the final piece of the puzzle to getting your customers to make a purchase.  

  • Multi-Touch Attribution is designed with the e-commerce customer journey in mind to get you the most accurate and reliable understanding of how many orders are really coming from your various marketing platforms. Facebook will overreport their performance by taking too much credit for sales. For example if a customer clicked on a Facebook ad on Monday, then clicked on a Google Ad on Tuesday, then made a $100 purchase on Friday, Facebook will claim full credit for this sale and report $100 in revenue, completely ignoring the fact that the customer also clicked on Google Ads. Likewise, Google Ads will also report $100 in revenue. So you have two ad channels reporting a total of $200 in revenue when you really only had one sale for $100. This is why we recommend our multi-touch attribution model. ThoughtMetric knows that the customer clicked on both Facebook ads and Google ads and will split up the credit for the sale between those two sources.