Titan’s Guide on the Multi-Touch Attribution Model

Nikita R.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: Jan 9th, 2025

You can find the use of multi-touch attribution models in the marketing world as they give professionals a chance to understand which touchpoints or interactions influence leads to convert into clients in the customer journey.

Join us in the article below to find out more about the different attribution models used in the marketing industry.

What is an Attribution Model?

Attribution models usually give credits at a single touchpoint in the customer journey. This touchpoint is often either the first or last interaction with a lead before conversion.

Since the traditional attribution model does not give a clear picture of the whole customer journey, many marketers adopt the multi-touch attribution model.

Multi-Channel Attribution Models

Before discussing multi-touch attribution modeling, we should mention multi-channel attribution models since these two approaches are often used by marketers interchangeably.

Regardless, it’s important to know that these two models are unique and cater to different marketing requirements.

For example, multi-channel attribution models assign credits to channels, as the name suggests. These channels could be social platforms, online searches, or advertising strategies, to name a few.

However, the main difference to multi-touch attribution models is that they do not take touchpoints and messaging into account.

Join us in the article below as we will now start to explore the multi-touch attribution model in more detail.

Multi-Touch Attribution Model: Marketing Solutions

Let’s begin by explaining what a multi-touch attribution model is. It’s basically an approach used in research to assign values to many touchpoints in the marketing customer journey. It can be used to view and examine the many interactions your customer has with your business in the purchasing process.

Marketing Touchpoints

In the digital marketing field, professionals use the term touchpoints to explain the interaction that a lead has with their business. Marketers will usually interact with customers through social media platforms, email, and campaigns.

Thanks to the multi-touch attribution model, marketers can examine many touchpoints in the customer journey while assigning credits.

Still, it’s important to take note that there are many types of multi-touch attribution models.

To help you choose one that meets your marketing requirements, we provide a few common multi-touch attribution models:

If you want to distribute credits equally among all the touchpoints in your customer journey, choose the Linear Attribution model.

On the other hand, if you need to give credits to touchpoints that are closer to conversion rather than the those that are further away, use the Time Decay Attribution model.

Choose the U-shaped Attribution model when you want to assign more credit to the first and last touchpoints with the rest of the values spread out among the other customer interactions. This model is also called position-based attribution in the marketing field.

Teams who work on statistics and machine learning algorithms are fans of the Algorithmic Attribution model. Also known as the Data-Driven Attribution model, you can use this model to analyze data and decide where touchpoint credits should be allocated.

The last attribution model we will discuss is the Custom Attribution model. These models are unique as each team will design a model that suits the needs of their customer journey.

Where are Multi-Touch Attribution Models Used?

Multi-touch attribution models are used in marketing teams to analyze the customer journey from end to end. Here are a few examples of marketing professionals and industries that adopt multi-touch attribution models.

Digital Marketers

Professionals in this digital marketing field use multi-touch attribution models to design campaigns. These optimized campaigns are distributed to customers through social media platforms, search engines, advertising strategies, and emails.

E-Commerce Companies

Online businesses, like e-commerce companies, adopt a multi-touch attribution model to measure the success of all their online marketing strategies.

They use the model to understand customers better as they travel from the first to the last touchpoint of a customer journey.

Advertising Agencies

Multi-touch attribution models are also used by advertising agencies as they provide detailed data to present to their major customers.

This data goes a long way in showing the agency’s customers how effective advertising channels are on different channels.

This view can help display the overall success or failure of the marketing campaign.

When to use Multi-Touch Attribution Models

Now that we know more about multi-touch attribution models and their impact in the marketing field, when would be a good time to use them?

To start, these advertising attribution models are always helpful when you have complex or long customer journeys and need to assign credits among numerous touchpoints.

Let’s take a look at a few other scenarios that call for the aid of multi-touch attribution models:

Use multi-touch attribution models if you have many marketing channels. For example, if your marketing team interacts with customers and leads through social media platforms, emails, and offline channels, then employing a multi-touch attribution model is a good idea to learn how each channel contributes to the success of your marketing campaigns.

Another good reason to use a multi-touch attribution model is that it is ideal for long sales cycles. For these types of product and service sales cycles, customers have many touchpoints that they pass before committing to a purchase. A multi-touch attribution model will help you see which touchpoints have the most impact on converting leads into customers.

And that’s a wrap on marketing attribution models. Thanks for exploring multi-touch attribution models with us. Here are a few more questions from regular readers that we can share with you. Let us know if you have a specific question that needs answering!

We hope to see you soon! 

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