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Most marketing strategies today can’t rely on an attribution model that credits a sale or conversion to just one touchpoint — like the first or last click. While a business or product may be straightforward, the journey a customer takes to ultimately make a purchase is not. It encompasses interactions that are digital and analog, mobile and static, online and offline.
By adopting a multi-touch attribution model, marketers can understand the entire customer journey and credit all touchpoints that influence conversions. Armed with this insight, they can improve how they allocate their marketing budgets, measure marketing campaign success, and analyse the return on investment (ROI) of marketing efforts.
Today’s marketers are adopting multi-touch attribution models at higher rates than ever. According to research from MMA Global, over half of marketers (52%) were using multi-touch attribution in 2024, and 57% of marketers surveyed by the marketing trade association said this method “is crucial as part of an ensemble of measurement solutions.”
In this guide, we explore how marketers can implement multi-touch attribution to fully utilise this method, gain valuable insights from customer journeys, and improve overall marketing performance. We’ll cover how to choose the right model, integrate robust data collection tools, test and refine your attribution strategies, and more.
Multi-touch attribution analysis considers how a customer gets to a conversion, not just what delivers the conversion. It’s a data-driven marketing model that, unlike single-touch models like first-touch and last-touch attribution, identifies and credits multiple touchpoints along the customer journey.
In a single-touch attribution model, if a customer makes a purchase after clicking on a link in a marketing text from a retailer, only that text would get credit for the conversion. By contrast, in a multi-touch attribution model, credit would be distributed across other key touchpoints in the customer’s journey — such as interacting with a Facebook ad that directed them to the retailer’s website, where they signed up for the text alerts that ultimately drove the conversion.
Keep in mind that the percentage of credit assigned to each touchpoint depends on which attribution model is used. We’ll cover some of the commonly used models later in this post.
Multi-touch attribution is about the journey, not the end. As such, it conveys a more accurate picture of all the factors that drive a customer to convert. This approach can help businesses and their marketing teams gain a more complete and accurate picture of how marketing efforts drive the desired results.
With data from a multi-touch attribution model, marketers can see how much each touchpoint contributed to a final conversion or sale. This detail can help marketers identify the channels and assets that moved the needle the most (and least) and then adjust and allocate the marketing budget to deliver a greater ROI.
There are four major multi-touch attribution models, and each technique has pros and cons worth considering. Here’s a closer look at these different approaches to attribution:
The linear attribution model is a straightforward approach to multi-touch attribution. It assigns credit equally to each marketing touchpoint throughout the customer journey. If there are 10 touches, for example, each one receives 10% of the credit.
The linear attribution model can be an easy introduction to multi-touch modeling if you are transitioning from single-touch attribution. The downside of this model is that each touchpoint gets equal credit, whether it is a high- or low-value touchpoint, so your ability to identify and optimise for the most influential interactions in the customer journey is limited.
The U-shaped attribution model gives considerable weight to the first and last touchpoints in the customer journey. That means most credit goes to the touch that first attracted a prospect (e.g., filling out a form, signing up for a trial) and the touch that resulted in the sale. So, if you have 10 touches, 25% of the credit might go to the first and last touches, and each intermediary touch would get only 6.25%.
If your business is focused on strategies for capturing and converting leads rather than heavily optimising every step in the middle, then the U-shaped attribution model could work well for you.
The W-shaped attribution model is a more balanced approach to U-shaped modeling. In this attribution model, most credit for a conversion is split among the first, middle, and last touchpoints. Here again, let’s say you have 10 touchpoints. So, initial awareness, lead generation, and conversion would each receive 25% of the credit with the balance of 25% split among the other seven touchpoints.
This form of attribution is suitable for complex marketing campaigns used across several channels. The W-shaped model can help you identify the best channels and understand each stage of the customer’s consideration of your product or service.
Like the practice of last-touch attribution, the time decay attribution model assigns the most credit to the touch that results in a conversion. It also has a receding credit, so all other touches leading up to the conversion receive less value the further they are from that final touch.
This model recognises the value of touches taking place closer to the last touch because they are more influential and increase the likelihood of conversion. Marketers use the time decay model to optimise for touches that drive conversions as well as the touches that increase the likelihood of a conversion happening soon.
The four models described above are off-the-shelf attribution models, with weights determined by the number of touchpoints and the style of the model. However, you can also create a custom multi-touch attribution model that is tailored to your marketing goals and the outcomes you value most.
Custom models often build on standard attribution models but adjust the weighting to better reflect what drives success for your business. For instance, if you think that a customer signing up for texts or a newsletter is a high-value touchpoint, but “off the shelf” models undervalue it because it occurs earlier in the customer journey, you can design a custom model to assign more credit to such interactions.
Custom attribution models often result from marketers’ long-term experimentation with standard models and learning what works best for the business and what doesn’t.
How can you make the most of multi-touch attribution to benefit your marketing strategy? If you are pursuing a data-driven marketing strategy, you can put multi-touch attribution to work for you straight away. You need to reach your customers where they are at the right time.
Multi-touch enables this by providing actionable insights into how, why, and when customers convert. You can use this knowledge to fine-tune paid search campaigns, display ads, and even the content of social media posts. Plus, you’ll know which channels to allocate the most resources to and when to adjust that budget.
Multi-touch attribution, often referred to in the marketing industry simply as MTA, can be tremendously helpful for marketers who want to determine the type of outreach they should make to leads, which channels they should use, and how they should frame their messaging.
If you are a convert to multi-touch attribution and think it can help you optimise your marketing campaigns, there are several steps you should take to use this method effectively. Seven of these steps are discussed in detail below.
Before you review these steps, it is important to understand that having access to accurate data is the key to making multi-touch attribution work well. As such, you’ll need to think carefully about the tools you’re using to collect marketing data and whether there are gaps in your data gathering. One common mistake is overlooking offline sources of data, like phone calls, because they aren’t as easy to track as or integrate with online data.
However, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and tools like Invoca, marketers can now easily derive a complete picture of the customer journey by combining phone conversation data with online and other customer activity. We’ll expand on that point later in this section.
We’ve already outlined four standard multi-touch models. Your first job is to pick the right model for your business. This will depend on the complexity of the customer journey and your marketing goals.
If your landscaping firm gets 80% of its business from referrals, that’s a relatively simple and short customer journey that a linear multi-touch model can map. However, if your customer journey is more complex, with many touchpoints, a more complex model, such as time decay or W-shaped, may be more appropriate.
And if you already have insight from a multi-touch model but want to meet a specific marketing goal, developing your own custom model may be your best bet.
Any attribution model you select will be meaningless without good data collected across all your marketing channels. Before attempting attribution, you will need to integrate data from all those channels — social media, paid search, display ads, email, online, and phone calls — to create a complete picture of the customer journey.
Online activity can be easily tracked using cookies and tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. You can also track which marketing channels drive phone call conversions by using a call tracking and analytics platform like Invoca.
Invoca tracks 100% of calls and digitises the data from them so that information can be integrated into martech tools with other conversion data from ads, emails, and social. This repository of customer data contains the rich insight you’ll need to accurately apply attribution throughout the customer journey.
Once you have your conversion data, you can start to map the customer journey. Don’t forget that phone calls are often your most valuable conversions. This is especially true when customers are considering high-stakes purchases, such as investing in insurance coverage, scheduling elective surgery, buying a car, or planning an annual vacation. So, be sure to include offline data with your online data to get that complete picture.
A customer journey map will help your marketing team visualise and understand the customer’s journey, from initial awareness of your business through consideration and lead generation, and help you assign the appropriate credit to each touchpoint.
In addition to tracking offline conversions through Invoca, you can use tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, HubSpot, and Hotjar to track online activity.
If you’ve selected the right attribution model, your process should align with your overall marketing objectives. The outcomes will support your strategic decision-making and help you optimise your marketing campaigns to meet your key performance indicators (KPIs).
But what about the business as a whole? Is marketing aligned with broader business objectives? This isn’t something to take for granted. You must work with other stakeholders, such as sales and product development, to ensure the resources you invest into your marketing strategy will help meet the business’ broader KPIs.
For example, if a financial services firm’s CEO has a current KPI to increase the adoption of a new retirement planning tool by 40% within the next fiscal year, marketing should adjust its strategy to help meet that goal. This might include running a targeted digital ad campaign highlighting the tool’s long-term benefits, collaborating with product development to create user-friendly demo videos, and developing messaging customer service teams can use to answer questions about and help promote the tool during phone calls with clients.
Revenue is any company's priority business objective. By using multi-touch models for attribution, marketers can gauge whether their efforts are translating into conversions and revenue, not just clicks and pageviews. And with a revenue execution platform like Invoca, they can go even further and prove the revenue impact of their marketing efforts by measuring the true ROI of marketing investments and getting credit for every offline conversion.
If you want to use multi-touch attribution, you need to set up cross-channel tracking to collect data from multiple touchpoints across your various marketing channels. You can do this by attaching unique identifiers to each channel or campaign. These unique identifiers can be as simple as a user’s email address, which you can use to track online interactions. You can also:
Cross-channel tracking is vital because not all leads or conversions take a straightforward path. Only by tracking and using advanced analytics tools to consolidate the data can you understand what is happening and provide an accurate representation of your marketing efforts.
Once you have a complete picture of how your marketing strategies are driving leads and conversions, you can confidently analyse the performance of each touchpoint in the customer journey. Home in on the touchpoints driving the best leads and most conversions, and adjust your strategy by placing more significant resources into those channels.
If you notice certain channels aren’t driving conversions, you can cut spending on them to conserve marketing budget. However, keep in mind that customers can be fickle. Their tastes and behaviors change, sometimes quite quickly. Regularly analysing your multi-touch data will help you keep marketing strategies on track and optimise the marketing budget.
Don’t allow your attribution strategy to be static. Once you embark on a specific attribution strategy, it will begin delivering its own data on how it is performing relative to your overall goals. Use insight from that historical data, along with specific feedback from individual marketing campaigns, to refine your strategy.
It is good practice to test attribution models continuously to determine which ones best suit your business goals. As we outlined earlier, once you have used a prebuilt multi-touch model, such as time delay or U-shaped, you may feel confident enough to design your own customised model to fit your specific objectives. You might even set up two models and A/B test them.
Multi-touch attribution is an approach more marketers are gravitating toward as they seek to better understand customer journeys and the impacts of marketing efforts in an increasingly omnichannel world. And, of all the touchpoints between a user and your business, phone calls can be one of the most valuable when it comes to attribution. So, be sure not to overlook them.
Invoca’s AI-driven call tracking and analytics can help support your multi-touch attribution efforts by providing comprehensive data regarding which ads, campaigns, channels, and website pages drive phone call conversions. With accurate attribution for phone leads, you can gain a complete picture of the customer journey and confidently identify the marketing efforts driving the best results and delivering the highest-value customers to your business.
Watch this short video to see how it works:
If you’d like to learn more about how multi-touch attribution, including phone call attribution, can help your marketing team, have a look at these resources:
To find out exactly how Invoca can help you achieve an effective multi-touch attribution strategy, book a customised demo with our team today.
