Conversion Attribution - Multi-Touch

Conversion Attribution splits credit for a conversion event across every source, medium, and campaign that touched a visitor's journey before they converted, using whichever attribution model fits how your team thinks about credit.

Early access. Conversion Attribution is rolling out gradually. Contact your account representative to turn it on for your organization.

What Multi-Touch Attribution Solves

What it is. Most analytics tools default to last-touch reporting: a conversion gets attributed entirely to whichever source the visitor used right before converting. Multi-touch attribution instead looks at every session a visitor had in the run-up to converting, and splits credit across all of them.

Why it matters. Last touch hides the channels that introduced or nurtured a visitor earlier in their journey. A visitor who first found you through paid social, came back twice through organic search, and converted after clicking an email link gets reported as 100% organic under last touch. Multi-touch attribution shows all three touchpoints, so budget and credit decisions reflect the full path, not just the final click.

How it works. For each visitor who triggered your chosen conversion event, Conversion Attribution looks back across their sessions within the lookback window you select, groups them by source, medium, and campaign, and splits credit between those touchpoints according to the attribution model you choose.

How Each Model Splits Credit

The model is the rule that divides one conversion's worth of credit across a visitor's touchpoints. Change the model and you change the slope of credit across the path. The conversions themselves don't change, only the story about which channels earned them. Ours Privacy gives you five models on the same first-party data, so you can see which channels hold up across all of them and which only look strong because the default model flatters them.

The diagrams below use one visitor with four touchpoints, earliest to most recent. The bars show each model's shape, not exact output, since the real split also depends on how many sessions a source appears in and how far apart they fall.

First Touch

All credit goes to the earliest touchpoint in the lookback window.

Paid social  ████████████  100%
Organic       ·              0%
Email         ·              0%
Direct        ·              0%

Use it when you want to know which channels introduce people to you and you're optimizing top-of-funnel discovery.

Last Touch

All credit goes to the most recent touchpoint before the conversion.

Paid social   ·              0%
Organic       ·              0%
Email         ·              0%
Direct       ████████████  100%

Use it when you want a single channel to own each conversion, for example to compare against an ad platform's last-click report.

Note: Under First Touch and Last Touch, an untagged (direct) session never steals credit from a tagged channel. The earliest (First Touch) or latest (Last Touch) tagged session wins; (direct) only takes credit when every touchpoint in the path is untagged. This mirrors the "last non-direct click" behavior marketers expect from most ad and analytics tools.

Linear

Credit is shared across the visitor's sessions, so a source seen in more sessions earns proportionally more. With four equally weighted sessions, each earns a quarter.

Paid social   ███           25%
Organic       ███           25%
Email         ███           25%
Direct        ███           25%

Credit is split per session, not per channel. A channel that shows up in several sessions (retargeting or email, for example) accumulates more Linear credit than one touched once. That's by design, but worth keeping in mind when you compare a high-frequency channel against a low-frequency one.

Use it when you treat every interaction as equally important and want the simplest, least opinionated multi-touch view.

U-Shaped

Position-based: the first and last touch each get 40% of the credit, and the remaining 20% is split evenly across the touchpoints in between.

Paid social  ████████       40%
Organic       ██            10%
Email         ██            10%
Direct       ████████       40%

Use it when you care most about how a visitor was introduced and what closed them, while still giving the middle of the journey some credit.

Time Decay

Touchpoints closer to the conversion earn more credit. Each touchpoint's weight halves every 7 days further back from the conversion, then the weights are scaled so the visitor's credit still sums to one conversion. In practice, a touch the day before converting is worth about double one from a week earlier, and roughly four times one from two weeks earlier.

Paid social   ██            least credit (oldest)
Organic       ███
Email         █████
Direct        ████████      most credit (most recent)

Use it when recency matters and the touches nearest the conversion did the most work, common for shorter consideration cycles and retargeting-heavy programs.

Choosing a Model

There's no single correct model. The honest approach is to read your conversions under more than one. Start with Last Touch to match what your ad platforms report, then switch to First Touch to see which channels they quietly undersell. Use Linear as a neutral baseline, U-Shaped when your team thinks in terms of "what opened and what closed," and Time Decay when recent touches genuinely matter more. A channel that ranks high across several models is doing real work at every stage; one that only ranks high under Last Touch may be harvesting demand that other channels created.

A Worked Example

Say one visitor converts on appointment_booked after four sessions inside the lookback window:

1. Paid social, about 21 days before converting
2. Organic search, about 14 days before
3. Organic search, about 7 days before
4. Email, the day before

That one conversion splits very differently depending on the model:

Reading across one row tells the story. Paid social introduced this visitor and owns the whole conversion under First Touch, but barely registers under Time Decay. Organic search never wins a single-touch model, yet earns the most credit under Linear because it appears in two of the four sessions. Email closes the visitor and dominates the recency-weighted view. Same conversion, five defensible stories. (Values are illustrative; the real split depends on how many sessions each source appears in and how far apart they fall.)

Permissions

Conversion Attribution uses the Web Analytics permission set:

If you don't have the required permission, ask your account administrator to grant Web Analytics access.

Building a Report

Navigate to Attribution Center > Conversion Attribution.

Step 1: Choose the Conversion Event and Date Range

Pick the event that counts as a conversion from the dropdown, which lists every event your website is tracking. Then select a date range of up to 31 days.

Step 2: Choose an Attribution Model

The attribution model controls how credit for a conversion is split across a visitor's touchpoints:

First Touch and Last Touch give all credit to a single session. Linear, U-Shaped, and Time Decay are true multi-touch models that spread credit across multiple sessions in the same path. See How Each Model Splits Credit above for how each one reshapes the same journey and when to choose it.

Step 3: Choose a Lookback Window

The lookback window sets how far back Conversion Attribution looks for a visitor's sessions before their conversion. Choose 7, 14, 30, or 60 days. A shorter window favors recent, bottom-of-funnel touchpoints; a longer window surfaces channels that introduced the visitor further in advance.

Step 4: Narrow with Audience Filters (Optional)

Add audience filters to scope the report to a subset of visitors, the same filter dimensions available in Web Analytics: UTM source, medium, campaign, content, and term, referrer, country, region, city, device, browser, operating system, and entry or exit page. You can also scope the report to a single web source.

If you have Web Analytics: Write access, save your filter combination as a segment to reuse it in future reports.

Viewing Results

Audience Contribution

When you scope the report with audience filters or a web source, a summary card shows what share of all conversions for the chosen event came from that scoped audience.

Top Touchpoints

A chart of the five sources with the highest attributed credit, ranked by their share of total attributed conversions. Expand a row in the table below to see the medium and campaign behind a source.

Top Combo

A card calling out the single highest-credit source, medium, and campaign combination, with its conversion credit, its share of the total, and the number of sessions behind it. A real UTM combination is preferred over (direct) for this card, so untagged traffic only takes the top spot when every path is untagged.

Source / Medium / Campaign Table

A hierarchical table breaking down attributed conversions by source, medium, and campaign:

Rows nest by UTM dimension: source, then medium, then campaign. Expand or collapse a row to drill into the next level, or use Expand all to open the full hierarchy. Sort by UTM path, sessions, or conversions. Conversions default to highest first.

Because Linear, U-Shaped, and Time Decay split one conversion across the touchpoints in a path, per-path conversion values can be fractional and do not sum to the converter total. First Touch and Last Touch award the whole conversion to one path.

Exporting

Click Export CSV to download the source, medium, campaign, sessions, conversions, and share percentage for every row in the table.

Next Steps

• Audience Performance: measure conversion rate and revenue for an audience you define.
• Event Attribution Insights: explore one event and the visitors behind it.
• Attribution FAQs: attribution models, lookback windows, exports, and more.