Multi-touch attribution distributes credit for a conversion across all the marketing touchpoints a buyer interacted with, rather than crediting only the first or last click. It is essential in B2B, where a single deal can involve many touches across weeks or months.
Why last-click misleads in B2B
Last-click attribution hands all the credit to the final touch, usually a branded search or a direct visit, and starves the upper-funnel channels that actually started the journey. In a buying cycle with six to twenty touches, that is not a rounding error, it is a wrong decision about where to spend.
Common models
- Linear splits credit evenly across every touch.
- Time-decay weights touches closer to the conversion more heavily.
- Position-based front- and back-loads credit to the first and last touch.
No model is perfect; privacy changes and dark social mean some touches are invisible. We use multi-touch attribution as a directional guide alongside pipeline and self-reported attribution, not as a single source of truth.