Multi-touch marketing attribution: €240 or €0

One €240 order under five models

Short answer. Multi-touch marketing attribution shares the money from one sale between the ads the buyer clicked before buying. Last click gives it all to the final ad, so the ad that found the buyer gets €0. Check first how many of your sales had more than one ad behind them.

Take one order. A buyer clicks your Meta ad on 1 September. On 22 September she clicks your Google ad and orders a €240 coat within the hour.

Linear and position based share the sale, and with two clicks that is half each. Time decay halves a click's weight every 7 days, the same 7 days Google's Search Ads 360 uses. A three-week-old click weighs one eighth of a fresh one. The sale splits 1 to 8, so the Meta ad keeps one part in nine, €27.

Find the ads that start sales

Two rows of that table steer a budget. First touch shows which ad found the buyer, and last click shows which ad closed the sale. An ad that finds buyers and seldom closes them looks dead under last click. It is the first one you would cut.

Sightwick counts the sales on your own site and puts both rows on your own campaigns. It gives credit to at most two visits per sale: the buyer's first visit and the visit that bought. Every visit in between is on that buyer's journey, with its date and source.

1. Link Meta and Google Ads by signing in. Each source then shows Spend and ROAS beside Conversions.
2. Open Attribution. The Model list opens on Last non-direct, the name for last click here. A typed address at the end does not count as a click.
3. Set Model to First touch and press Apply.

In our demo shop, Meta closes 9 sales in 30 days under last click, with €1,356 of revenue on €2,224 of spend. Every euro brings back €0.61.

Under First touch the same spend has 13 sales and €2,259 of revenue. Every euro now brings back €1.02. Meta found 4 buyers who ordered through another source. Under last click you would have cut the ads that found them.

Set Group to Campaign and the same switch works per campaign.

Count the sales with two sources

Before you compare models, check how many of your sales had more than one source, such as Meta first and Google Ads later. Sightwick counts that for you. The line is on the Attribution screen and starts with Overlap.

Open the line and it lists each combination of sources with its number of sales. In the demo shop that adds up to 8 of the 49 sales with a known source. Google Ads and Meta shared 2 of them.

Those 8 are the sales a model can move between sources. The other 41 had one source and stay with it under every model. If your own number is near zero, stop comparing models. Spend the time on your ads.

Follow one buyer, visit by visit

The table adds sales up. For one buyer, open Visitors and click a visitor. You get the customer journey: each visit with its date, its source and campaign, the pages, and the days between visits.

One buyer in the demo shop came 3 times in 38 days.

• 15 August: a Facebook ad
• 9 September: a Google search
• 22 September: a Google ad, and an order of €258

It has the shape of the coat order, with a Google search in between. On the Attribution screen that order sits with Meta under First touch and with Google Ads under Last non-direct.

Sightwick looks back 120 days

That buyer clicked the Facebook ad 38 days before the order. Meta's own report leaves the sale out, because Meta looks back 7 days at most. Google Ads looks back 30 days as standard and 90 at most, Sightwick 120 days as standard.

Inside their windows, Meta and Google Ads each count the full sale, and that is one sale counted twice.

Google Ads dropped four models

You can no longer compare first click with last click inside Google Ads. Its help page says first click, linear, time decay and position based are no longer supported. Last click and data-driven are left. Google Analytics dropped the same four in November 2023.

Sightwick still has all five models in one list. To see first touch beside last click, your sales have to be counted on your own site.

Questions on clicks, devices and price

What happens to a click in the middle?

You see it on the buyer's journey. The money of the sale goes to the first visit, the buying visit, or both.

What if both ads run on Meta?

Two ads on the same platform count as one source, so the sale stays whole. When both clicks carry Meta's click ID, First touch puts it on the earlier ad and Last non-direct on the later one.

What if the buyer clicks on a phone and orders on a computer?

Then Sightwick sees two visitors, because it remembers the first visit in the browser. The order goes to the visit that bought.

What does Sightwick cost after the trial?

Plans start at €50 a month, billed monthly. Cancel during the 30-day trial and you pay nothing.