IN DEFENCE OF LAST TOUCH ATTRIBUTION (because I keep reading people slagging it off)
Suppose you're a small business owner who has to deal with online sales. You have four hours a week max to check your website performance - usually much less. And you want to keep an eye on where your sales come from.
So you start seeing where a user was just before buying, and attributing sales there. That's the last-touch attribution model, which gives 100% credit to the final marketing touchpoint before someone makes a purchase.
But here's the challenge – this sort of tracking doesn't quite represent how we really shop. The customer journey is a labyrinth of touch points, each doing some work to 'win' the sale. Linking a sale to a specific activity is a huge oversimplification; just because someone bought from you just after seeing an ad, doesn't mean that ad was what drove the sale. A full team of touch points wins the game, not one player.
Indeed, Nielsen did a huge study on attribution in 2011, 'Beyond Clicks and Impressions', and found the relationship between engagement, clicks, or even ad recall is pretty close to nil.
But the dirty little secret is that no model is perfect. Data-driven, linear, time-decayed or other models don't *really* capture what happens. They might be more accurate, but they're never perfect – and if you don't have hundreds of thousands a year to spend on analytics, then you need a quick-and-dirty way to see where your sales are coming from. Even if it's not perfect.
That's where last-touch shines.
It cuts through the noise and focuses on what really matters: the final push that led to a conversion. It's attributing your goal to your centre forward, even if your midfield has done all the heavy lifting storming past the defence and setting up an easy shot.
And last touch was used for over a hundred years – Claude Hopkins turned marketing to a science with couponing, a last-touch attribution model, with huge success. It's principles are still alive today, and worth tens of millions - Nectar loyalty cards was sold to Sainsbury's for £60m just a few years ago, after all.
If you want wholly accurate modelling of your customer journey, and you've the budget to implement it, then last touch isn't right for you. But if you need to quickly see what platforms are where your customers are coming from, its bloody great.
