What is last-click vs multi-touch attribution?
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You send an email. The reader clicks through. Two days later they buy. Email gets all the credit. That's last-click attribution in a nutshell.
Last-click attribution gives 100% of the conversion credit to the final touchpoint before a purchase or sign-up. Simple, easy to explain, and common in most ESP reporting dashboards. The problem: it ignores everything that happened before. A reader might have seen your social post, clicked a search ad, read your blog, and then finally converted after your email. Last-click would credit only the email.
Multi-touch attribution distributes credit across all the touchpoints in a conversion path. First-touch, linear, time-decay, and data-driven are all variations. They give a fuller picture of how email fits into your broader marketing mix. (Of course, setting this up properly requires connecting your ESP data to an analytics platform, which is easier said than done.)
For most email-first senders, last-click is fine as a starting point. It's when you're running email alongside paid ads and organic search that multi-touch starts to matter. If your campaigns look wildly profitable in email reporting but your overall revenue isn't moving, that's a sign to look at conversion attribution more carefully.
A practical middle ground: use last-click for campaign-level decisions, but track full-funnel attribution in a tool like Google Analytics 4 to see the bigger picture. And make sure your email links always carry UTM parameters, so your clicks actually show up in that full-funnel view.
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