Multi-Touch Attribution

Multi-touch attribution splits the credit for a conversion across every ad and channel the buyer touched, instead of handing it all to one.

A single buyer might meet you through a Meta video, come back on a Google search ad, then convert from an email. Last-click gives the whole sale to the email. Multi-touch spreads the credit across all three, trying to reflect that each played a part in getting the order.

Say a customer had four touches before buying. An even split hands each touch a quarter of the sale, so no single channel looks like the hero and none looks worthless. That is closer to reality than crowning whichever ad happened to be last.

Multi-touch is only as good as the touches it can actually see. With cookies leaky and cross-device paths broken, much of the journey is invisible now, so the model splits credit across a partial map and many teams have shifted toward incrementality tests and media mix modeling to check its work.

Spreading credit is honest only when you can see the whole path.