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Welcome back!

We hope everyone had an awesome weekend! This week, we’re continuing our new theme on attribution models, except we’re winding backward and digging into first touch, after covering last touch last week.

For the rest of the month, we’ll move past single-touch attribution models, which give all the credit to a single customer touchpoint, and look at more complicated (and typically more realistic) models.

Let’s dive in! 🏃‍♂️🚀

News

Tools + Productivity

Strategy

Love at first sight

Say Sarah spots your ad for eco-friendly sneakers on Facebook and gets curious. She hops over to Google to check out some reviews about your brand.

After seeing good things, she heads to your Instagram to get a closer look at your products and clicks the link in your bio. It takes her straight to your website, where she browses for a bit and ends up purchasing a pair of your sustainable sneakers.

Even though there were several steps to the journey, a first-touch attribution model assigns full credit to the Facebook advertisement, even though the final conversion occurred through a different channel.

Now what?

Let’s say you’re selling electric bikes, and you’ve got ads running all over— from Google search to YouTube videos to TikTok influencer promos. What you don’t know is where people are actually discovering you to begin with.

You set up UTM tracking on all your campaign links: TikTok bio, YouTube descriptions, Google ads, etc. This keeps tabs on the very first interactions potential customers have with your brand.

After looking into which marketing channels and campaigns are driving the most traffic, you see that TikTok steals the show for initial interactions. Videos of influencers doing trick shots with your bike draw in that initial attention, and the really interested viewers explore other channels to eventually make a purchase.

Even though customers may have clicked “Buy” from a website link, since TikTok is where they first learn about your brand, that’s where you focus more energy and resources.

Meet when?

This model prioritizes the awareness stage of the funnel, focusing on how exactly customers discover your business to begin with. It’s based on the fact that if they never came across your business and became intrigued enough to learn more from that first impression, there would be no interaction, no engagement, and no sales.

Many would argue this method gets you 80% of the results with 20% of the effort because it’s simple and focuses on the first impression, which sets the tone for the rest of the journey;

So, is this the right framework for your brand?

In a sentence, the first-touch model is right for your product if brand awareness is the number one goal, and if the data capabilities needed for more advanced models is outside of your brand’s bandwidth.

When we’re looking at the buyers’ end of things, this model works best for companies with short buyer’s journeys because there are fewer touchpoints that you’re disregarding.

On the seller’s side, companies looking to capture as many eyes as possible can use the first-touch model to identify the most effective ways to source customers for their business.

Like last-touch, the first-touch model is easy to understand and helps improve which channels are used at the top of the funnel, setting up the rest of the funnel for success with high-quality leads.

Are first impressions everything?

Although first-touch attribution is straightforward, it can mislead you to overweight certain interactions and disregard more impactful ones, eventually misallocating resources to those misattributed touchpoints.

In fact, today’s average B2B journey has an average of eight touchpoints, while B2C stands at an average of six.

Users who click on ads but don’t convert behave differently than those who do, but first touch clumps them together.

Plus, this attribution model doesn’t account for repeat customers— and the fact that lots of customers don’t follow a linear path from initial contact to conversion.

The last big con— it’s pretty much impossible to measure the impact of the first impression outside of digital touchpoints.

Although surveys can ask customers where they initially heard about your brand, if the first touchpoint was an in-store visit, billboard, or print ad, the implementation of first-touch attribution starts falling apart.

Spice it up

First-touch is the simplest model, but you can squeeze out more insights by analyzing initial interaction data within different customer segments. This can reveal differences in how effective early touchpoints are for different groups to adjust different channels targeting those cohorts.

For example, let’s say you run an online fitness program and two of your segments are young professionals aged 25-35, and parents aged 35-50. While the former discovers you primarily through Instagram influencer posts, the latter discovers you through Facebook ads.

From there, you can adjust your Instagram partnership strategy to focus on influencers that resonate with the 25-35 demographic, while tailoring Facebook ads to the needs of parents.

Looking Ahead

Now that we’ve gone over the two most straightforward attribution models, stay tuned for the next few weeks, where we’ll dig into some more complicated (and honestly, realistic) attribution models.

After learning about the different attribution models, you may discover that a hybrid approach that lies somewhere between two approaches is the best strategy for you.

Attribution models

Week 1: Last-touch attribution
Week 2: First-touch attribution (this week!)
Week 3: Linear attribution
Week 4: Time-decay attribution
Week 5: Position-based attribution

Stay tuned!

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