First touch vs last touch attribution: which should a small business use?

What each one credits

An attribution model is a rule for which visit gets the credit when someone signs up or pays. (The basics are in attribution, explained.)

• First touch credits the source of the person’s first recorded visit: the post, ad, search or link that introduced them.
• Last touch credits the source of the visit just before the conversion: usually whatever they clicked on the day they paid.

Both give all of the credit to one visit. They differ only in which one.

Worked example (made-up numbers)

Ten people pay you this month. For each you know the first visit and the visit they paid from.

	First touch	Last touch
Reddit post	4	0
Search	3	1
Newsletter sponsorship	2	0
Your own launch email	0	6
Direct (typed address, bookmark)	1	3

Last touch says your email and direct visits brought nine of the ten. First touch says Reddit, search and the sponsorship found nine of them. Same customers, opposite conclusions.

What each over- and under-credits

First touch over-credits the channel that introduced people, even if they’d have forgotten you without later reminders. It under-credits what kept them coming back: your emails, a comparison page, a second post.

Last touch over-credits the final step, which for a small product is often something you own (your email, your pricing page, a bookmark) or a visit that lost its source and shows as direct. It under-credits the channel that found the person weeks earlier, which is the channel you’d put more effort into.

Neither is wrong. They answer different questions: first touch asks “where do my customers come from?”, last touch asks “what did they do right before buying?”

Why a small product often starts with first touch

• The question you need answered early is where to find more people. Your own emails can only reach people who already found you, so crediting them tells you little about where to post, write or spend next.
• Few conversions make the last step noisy. With ten customers, one person bookmarking your site moves last-touch direct by a tenth.
• First touch is easy to check. Record the source of the first visit, keep it with the signup, and every customer has exactly one answer you can look up.

Last touch is still worth a glance when you want to know which of your own pages or emails closes sales.

Multi-touch needs volume

Multi-touch models (linear, time decay, position-based, data-driven) split the credit across several visits. They need many customers, each with several recorded visits, before the split means anything; with a handful of payments, the result mostly reflects a few people’s habits. Even large tools have narrowed their options: Google Analytics removed first click, linear, time decay and position-based models in November 2023, keeping data-driven and last click (Google Analytics Help: attribution models). So in GA4 you can’t pick first touch as the model that credits conversions.

How long a first visit should keep its credit, and whether it gets every payment or just the first, is a separate question: see how long should a source get credit?

With Nordva Launch

Launch traces payments by first touch only. It links each Stripe customer to a first visit through, in order, nordva_visitor_id in the customer’s or subscription’s metadata, a user id sent with identify() that matches the one in the customer’s Stripe metadata, an email sent with identify(), or their waitlist email, and shows paying customers by referring site and by country on every plan, by UTM source and campaign on Builder. It doesn’t offer last touch or multi-touch. Try the demo to see it with example data.