Understanding How Your Marketing Analytics Gives Credit for Conversions

When chatting with marketers, one of the most common questions we hear at HubSpot is regarding "first touch" versus "last touch" attribution in marketing analytics. First touch, last touch, and assist reports are all different ways to attribute conversions on your website, and each of these attribution methods will tell you something different and important about the effectiveness of your marketing and the behavior of your visitors.

The following guide will help you understand the difference between "last touch," "first touch," and "assists" attribution, as well as give you a sense of the primary use-cases for each approach. As a wise man once said, you should always give credit where credit is due!

What Are 'Attributions' in Marketing Analytics?

Before we begin, first a definition ...

'Attribution' is a way of understanding which marketing channels or campaigns contributed to a conversion on your website. In HubSpot software, for example, you'll notice that our Marketing Analytics tools report on the number of leads and customers generated through various marketing efforts -- that information is what you'd call an attribution. But because a lead's or customer's lifecycle with your company is made up of a number of different interactions, there are multiple ways to report on attribution. Understanding how attribution works will help you understand which of your marketing efforts are actually generating results.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's discuss the different attribution methods that can be used in your marketing analytics.

Last Touch Attribution

Most analytics packages, including Google Analytics, use last touch attribution as their main method of reporting. Last touch data shows you the most recent interactions and conversions your leads had on your website before they converted.

When It's Useful

As its name suggests, last touch reporting is useful in determining what happened right before your leads converted. If we were presenting last touch data for a given soccer game, for example, it would attribute the winning goal to whoever kicked the ball into the net. Last touch analytics, therefore, is often a good measure of the effectiveness of different landing pages, email campaigns, or other efforts that tend to lead to a direct conversion. What it doesn't tell you, however, is anything else that led up to that conversion. So, if we were to extend that same soccer analogy, it wouldn't give credit to the defender who made that great forward pass that made the goal possible.  

HubSpot's Landing Page Analytics report (pictured below), for instance, uses last touch attribution to help marketers evaluate which landing pages were most effective at generating leads and customers. Looking at first touch attribution for the two customers who converted on the Introduction to Business Blogging ebook offer, however, would show marketers an entirely different view. 

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