First-touch and last-touch attribution
First-touch and last-touch attribution are single-touch models that give all the credit for a deal to one recorded interaction, the earliest for first touch and the final one for last touch.
Both are easy for your team to compute and explain. First touch credits whatever introduced the buyer, and last touch credits whatever came right before the deal. Each depends entirely on which touches your CRM recorded.
How do they credit your events?
Your event can sit anywhere in a buying cycle. Say search finds a buyer, your rep meets them at a show, and a later email converts them. First touch credits search, last touch credits the email, and your show gets no credit. The 2 views of one program can differ widely, so keep both in sight.
A missing record moves the credit too. If your rep’s booth conversation never reached your CRM, first touch goes to whatever your CRM recorded next, and your event drops out of both views. That’s what an attribution leak costs you.
How do they relate to other measures?
- Multi-touch attribution spreads the credit across every recorded touch.
- Event-sourced vs. event-influenced attribution asks whether the event created the opportunity or advanced one already open. FieldXM’s reporting shows you those 2 separately, and it doesn’t run a multi-touch model.
- In follow-up, first touch names the first sales activity on a lead, a separate measure with a similar name.
Related terms
- Multi-touch attributionMulti-touch attribution is a model that splits credit for a deal across the recorded marketing and sales touches before it, by a rule such as linear, time-decay, or position-based weighting.
- Event-sourced vs. event-influenced attributionEvent-sourced vs. event-influenced attribution is the distinction between opportunities an event created and opportunities already open that an event advanced, which teams report separately so neither number inflates the other.
- First touchFirst touch is the first recorded sales activity on a captured lead, such as a call, an email, or a sequence enrollment, and the moment that stops its follow-up clock.
- Closed-loop reportingClosed-loop reporting is reporting that ties each captured interaction to what followed it, from lead to meeting, opportunity, and closed-won revenue, so results trace back to the event or program behind them.
- Attribution leakAn attribution leak is an event-sourced lead or opportunity that entered the CRM outside the standard capture path, so the CRM loses its connection to the event and understates the event's contribution.
See it in FieldXM
- ReportingSee each show’s cost, pipeline, revenue, and ROI. Know which shows earn next year’s budget, and forecast what the next one will bring.
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