First-Touch vs Last-Touch Attribution: What's the Difference?

First-touch attribution gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the very first channel or campaign that brought a person into contact with your business - often a blog post, an organic search result, or a top-of-funnel ad they saw weeks or months before converting.

Last-touch attribution gives 100% of the credit to the final touchpoint immediately before conversion - frequently a branded search or a retargeting ad, since those tend to sit right at the end of the journey regardless of what actually built the intent to buy.

Both models are single-touch simplifications of a journey that usually involves several channels, and each one systematically over-credits the part of the funnel it measures. First-touch makes top-of-funnel content and awareness campaigns look more valuable than they may be in isolation; last-touch makes bottom-of-funnel and branded campaigns look like they're doing all the work, when they're often just closing demand something else created. Multi-touch or data-driven attribution models exist to correct for this, but even a simple comparison of first-touch versus last-touch reporting side by side is usually enough to reveal which channels are being systematically under-credited by whichever single model a business has defaulted to.