Buyer Journeys and attribution models

When someone takes five visits across five channels before buying, "where did that sale come from?" has more than one honest answer. Attribution models are just the different ways of answering it, and TrueMetriks gives you the three that marketers actually use.

Attribution models

You switch between models with the Attribution dropdown. There are three:

• First-touch credits the whole sale to the channel that first brought the person in. This is your acquisition view: which channels start journeys.
• Last-touch credits the whole sale to the channel on the visit where the purchase happened. This is your closing view: which channels seal the deal.
• Any-touch credits the sale to every channel that appeared anywhere in the journey. If a buyer touched Facebook, then email, then Google before purchasing, all three get credit for that purchase. This is the one most marketers want, because it shows every channel that helped, not just the first or the last. (Because one purchase is credited to several channels, the per-channel purchase counts under any-touch can add up to more than your real total; that is expected.)

Why not linear or time-decay

You may have seen two other models elsewhere. Linear splits one sale into equal fractions across every touch (a fifth of a sale each, across five touches). Time-decay does the same but gives recent touches a bigger fraction than older ones. We deliberately do not use them.

The reason is simple: marketers do not think in fractions of a sale. Telling someone "Facebook earned 0.2 of this purchase" is not useful. What they actually want is to see the real sequence: first touch was a Facebook ad, then email, then Instagram, then a Google search, and then they bought. First-touch and last-touch give you the two ends of that story, and any-touch gives you the full cast of channels involved. Fractional-credit models bury that sequence behind math, so we leave them out.

See revenue by model on the Revenue page

The Revenue page has the Attribution dropdown at the top. Switch it and every row in the source, campaign, and content breakdowns recalculates to credit purchases and revenue the way that model does.

Flip to First-touch to see which channels acquire new people, Last-touch to see which channels close, and Any-touch to see every channel that played any part in your sales. Reading the same period three ways is what tells you, for example, that a channel which rarely gets the last click is actually starting most of your journeys.

See one buyer's full journey under Users

The Revenue page tells you the story across all your traffic. To see one person's path, go to Users and open any user. Their profile lists every visit they have made, in order, so you can follow exactly how they went from first contact to purchase.

Each card is one visit, newest at the top, with the channel that drove it and what they did. Reading from the bottom up, you can watch the whole journey unfold: the ad that first found them, the touches that brought them back, and the visit where they finally bought.

This matters most when you have long sales cycles or an expensive product, where nobody buys on day one. Blended numbers make it look like whatever channel got the last click did all the work, when really an earlier channel did the expensive job of finding the customer in the first place. Following real journeys lets you give credit to the channels that start them, not just the ones that happen to be there at the finish.