What is Last Touch Attribution?
Last touch attribution is also known as last interaction or last click attribution.
It is a marketing attribution model that assigns a 100% of the credit for a conversion to the final touchpoint that a customer interacts with before making a purchase or taking any desired action.
This touchpoint could be a click on an ad, a visit to your website, or even just seeing your brand mentioned online.
In short, the last touchpoint gets all the credit for driving the conversion.
How Does the Last Touch Attribution Model Work?
For example, a customer sees a banner ad for your company (touchpoint 1).
They click on the ad and visit your website (touchpoint 2) but get distracted and leave without making a purchase.
A few days later, the same customer reads a positive review about your product online (touchpoint 3).
Now that their interest is piqued, they return to your website directly (touchpoint 4) and complete a purchase.
Under the last click attribution model, touchpoint 4 where the customer visited the website directly, would receive all the credit for the conversion.
Even though the initial banner ad (touchpoint 1) had originally sparked their interest, and the online review (touchpoint 3) sparked it further, only the final interaction gets recognized.
Benefits of Last Touch Attribution Model:
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Simple Yet Effective:
Last touch attribution is one of the easiest attribution models to understand and implement. It requires a minimal amount of analysis and provides a clear picture of which marketing channels directly drive conversions.
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Focus on Bottom-of-the-Funnel (BOFU) Efforts:
By highlighting the final touchpoint, last touch attribution is able to help you in identifying which marketing efforts are the most effective in closing deals. This allows marketers to optimize campaigns for higher conversion rates.
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Valuable and Actionable Insights:
The knowledge of which channels are driving conversions can prove to be a quite valuable and actionable insight. In this way you are able to allocate resources directly towards high-performing channels in a strategic manner. It also helps you optimize those channels that may not be performing all that well.
Drawbacks of Last Touch Attribution:
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Overlooks the Customer Journey:
Last touch attribution only considers the final touchpoint, this means that the role of earlier interactions that may have influenced the customer’s decision is undermined completely. This can lead to a skewed understanding of what actually drives conversions.
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Potential for Inaccuracy:
Nowadays, multi-touch customer journeys are quite prevalent which means that relying solely on the last touchpoint may not be a great idea as it can be inaccurate. This is because the customer’s decision might be the result of other marketing efforts but that would not be visible in the attribution data.
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Limited Insight into Brand Awareness Efforts:
Last touch attribution often overlooks brand awareness campaigns that appear earlier in the customer journey. These campaigns may not directly lead to conversions but it is an undeniable fact that they are still crucial for building brand recognition and trust amongst customers.
When to Use Last Touch Attribution
Although it has its limitations, last touch attribution can prove to be a valuable tool when implemented in the right scenarios.
Here are some situations where it might be the best fit:
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Short Sales Cycles:
When customers make decisions quickly, with as little touch points as possible, last touch attribution can offer a clear picture of which channels are driving conversions directly.
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Performance-Based Marketing:
For marketing campaigns that focus on immediate sales (like pay-per-click), attributing the sale to the final interaction a customer had can be a good way to evaluate the effectiveness of those channels.
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Limited Resources:
If you don’t have a lot of time or money to analyze complicated attribution models, tracking the last thing a customer saw before buying can still give you a basic idea of what’s driving your sales.
Plus Points:
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Last Touch Attribution and Multi-Touch Attribution:
Instead of focusing entirely on the last interaction, multi-touch attribution models acknowledge that multiple touch points play a role in driving conversions. By distributing credit across these touch points, you gain a more holistic view of your marketing effectiveness.
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Integration with Analytics Tools:
Many of today’s analytics tools offer built-in last touch attribution capabilities. By integrating your marketing data with these tools, you can get a better understanding of your conversion paths and optimize your campaigns accordingly.
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Attribution Modeling Limitations:
No attribution model is perfect. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. To get a more complete understanding of your marketing effectiveness, it is always a good idea to use a combination of models.
To Sum Up:
Last touch attribution is a simple attribution model that focuses solely on the final touchpoint that a customer interacts with before converting.
While it offers ease of use and helps point out channels that directly drive conversions, it doesn’t always account for the entire customer journey.
This is why it is important to be aware of its limitations and consider using it with other attribution models to gain a more comprehensive understanding of your marketing effectiveness.
