Marketing Attribution Models Explained: First-Touch, Last-Touch & Beyond

Marketing attribution assigns credit for a conversion to the touchpoints that led to it. Get it right and you learn which campaigns actually drive revenue; get it wrong and you double down on whatever happened to be last in the sequence.

First-touch attribution

All the credit goes to the first interaction. Good for understanding what creates awareness and fills the top of the funnel — but it ignores everything that closed the deal.

Last-touch attribution

All the credit goes to the final interaction before conversion. Simple and common, but it over-credits bottom-of-funnel touches (like a branded search) and hides the campaigns that started the journey.

Linear and multi-touch

Linear splits credit evenly across every touch. Position-based models weight the touches that matter most: U-shaped emphasizes the first touch and the one that converted a lead, W-shaped adds the touch that created the opportunity, and full-path models also credit the touch that closed the deal. These paint a fuller picture but need cleaner data to trust.

Which model should you use?

Start with first- and last-touch side by side — the gap between them tells you how much of your funnel each stage owns. Move to multi-touch once your data is reliable and your sales cycle is long enough to have real multi-step journeys.

The real prerequisite: connected data

Attribution is only as good as the data behind it. If campaigns, engagement, and pipeline live in separate tools, you are stitching credit together by hand. When they share one data model, attribution is just a report.

Zeluto ships first- and last-touch attribution from contact activity — see marketing analytics & attribution.