What is Multi-Touch Attribution?

Multi-touch attribution is a way of measuring marketing and sales results that splits credit for a new lead, deal or closed revenue across several touches in the buyer’s path, instead of giving it all to the first or last one.

At a glance

• It’s one family of attribution modeling. The other family, single-touch, credits only the first or the last touch.
• Common multi-touch models are linear, U-shaped, W-shaped, time decay and full path, each with fixed weights.
• Google Analytics retired its linear, time decay and position-based models in November 2023 and kept only its algorithmic model and last click.
• Every model depends on touches being logged against the right contact and deal.

How the main models split credit

HubSpot’s attribution reports are a useful reference because they publish the weights:

• Linear: equal credit to every interaction.
• U-shaped: 40% to the first interaction, 40% to the one that created the contact, 20% spread across the rest.
• W-shaped: 30% each to the first interaction, contact creation and deal creation, 10% across the rest.
• Time decay: more credit to recent touches, on a 7-day half-life.
• Full path: 22.5% each to first touch, contact creation, deal creation and the last touch before close, 10% to everything in between.

A multi-touch attribution example

Example (illustrative): a closed deal worth $40,000 had four touches. The buyer found you through a LinkedIn ad, came back through a webinar, filled in a demo form, and replied to an SDR’s call. Under a W-shaped model, the ad, the demo form and the SDR call that created the deal get $12,000 each, and the webinar gets $4,000.

Under last touch, the SDR call would get all $40,000 and the ad nothing, which is why teams with long cycles and several channels move to a multi-touch view.

Common multi-touch attribution mistakes

• Missing sales touches. HubSpot only counts calls and meetings that are logged and associated with both the contact and the deal. Unlogged SDR work makes outbound look like it did nothing.
• Tracking contacts, not accounts. B2B deals involve several people. If only one contact is tied to the deal, the other stakeholders’ touches vanish.
• Treating the weights as truth. A U-shaped model doesn’t discover that first touch matters 40%; it assumes it. Pick the model that fits the question.
• Ignoring offline touches. Events, referrals and dark social only count if someone records them or uses tracked links.
• Deals with blank fields. Revenue attribution needs an amount, a create date and a close date on the deal, or the deal drops out of the report.

How multi-touch attribution shows up in a revenue system

Attribution is only as good as the logging behind it, so the work is mostly in the CRM: one campaign naming convention, tracked links, every call and meeting tied to a deal. We set this up inside partners’ own HubSpot or Salesforce as part of our RevOps work.

Terms that sit next to multi-touch attribution

Credit usually rolls up to the cost per lead and CAC of each channel. Account-level models fit ABM programs, where several people at one company each add a touch, and they help judge demand generation spend. The points that W-shaped models weight are the same handoffs a funnel tracks.