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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.
Key Takeaways
1. Top-of-funnel channels are recognized with multi-touch
Meta Ads jumps from $14.6K under last-touch to $20.9K under multi-touch. This suggests Meta was often an early or mid-journey touchpoint that last-touch ignored. SMS also receives more credit when multiple interactions are considered. Additionally, ChatGPT jumps from 0 to $3K.
2. Channels that often close the sale look stronger under last-touch
Email, Referrals, Organic Search, and Organic Social all appear to generate more revenue in last-touch. Email jumps from $6K to $8K, Referrals from $6.9K to $11.8K, Organic Search from $10.9K to $13.8K, and Organic Social from $2.4K to $3.8K. These channels tend to show up near the end of the buying journey, which last-touch attribution gives full credit to.
Why This Matters for Your Brand
For this small e-commerce brand, the analysis covered just two weeks. Larger brands looking over longer time frames typically see even bigger differences. If you are making budget allocation or strategy decisions based only on last-touch data, you may be undervaluing key channels that drive discovery and engagement earlier in the customer journey.
Ready to see how multi-touch attribution could change the way you measure performance? Book a demo and get a clearer view of your marketing impact.
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