What is Last Touch?
Last-touch attribution is an Attribution Model where 100% of a Conversion is credited to the final interaction before the conversion event. In other words, whichever channel/campaign/session touched the user last gets all the credit. It’s simple, deterministic, and popular across tools from GA4 to privacy-first platforms like Plausible, Matomo, and Simple Analytics.
How does Last Touch attribution work?
- Track all touchpoints with consistent UTM tagging.
- Group visits into a Session.
- Identify the interaction immediately preceding the conversion.
- Assign 100% credit to that last touch (e.g., Email click, Paid Search, Direct, Referral).
Example
Suppose 170 purchases happened this week. Using last-touch logic, your channel report might look like:
| Channel (last touch) | Conversions |
|---|---|
| Paid Search | 80 |
| 50 | |
| Direct | 40 |
Channel-level last-touch conversion rate can be computed as:Last-touch Conversion Rate = Conversions attributed to channel ÷ Sessions from that channel (see Conversion Rate).
Why teams use it
- Dead-simple model for fast decisioning and QA.
- Aligns with short funnels and promotional bursts.
- Highlights end-of-funnel demand capture (e.g., branded search, cart-recovery email).
Limitations to watch
- Undervalues upper-funnel work (display, content, community).
- Biased toward channels that close sessions (retargeting, coupons, “open in app”).
- Sensitive to cookie loss and cross-device gaps; “Direct” often inflates.
- Can mislead for long or multi-stakeholder journeys.
When to use it
- As a baseline alongside Attribution comparisons.
- For tactical budget shifts in clearly bottom-funnel campaigns.
- To sanity-check more complex models (e.g., data-driven or rules-based).
Implementation tips
- Standardize Campaign names and UTMs; avoid collisions.
- Define primary conversions vs. micro-goals before reporting.
- Audit session stitching and self-referrals; ensure the “last touch” is truly last.
- Compare with First Touch to see creation vs. capture of demand.