The channel that found them. The channel that converted them.
Every lead carries both: the first touch that brought them to your site and the last touch before the form. You see both, on every lead, without choosing a model or configuring anything. It is also called first click attribution. Same model, different name.
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The first interaction takes the credit.
A lead might touch several things before converting. First touch ignores all but the earliest. If someone first arrived from a LinkedIn post, then returned twice and converted from a search, first touch credits LinkedIn. The model is built to honour the introduction.
This is exactly what HubSpot’s Original Source property captures: the first touch, set once and never overwritten.
What it is good at, and what it hides.
First touch is clear and hard to game, which is its appeal. It also pretends nothing happened after the introduction, which is its blind spot.
Crediting what fills the funnel
- Showing which channels create awareness
- A single, clear answer per lead
- Hard to distort with last-minute touches
Everything after the introduction
- What nurtured the lead between first touch and conversion
- What actually closed the deal
- Long cycles where the first touch is months old
First touch vs last touch.
- 01Use first touch when you want to know which channels and campaigns bring new people into your world, and where to spend to fill the top of the funnel.
- 02Use last touch when you want to know what closes, the final nudge before the form. It flatters whatever sits nearest the conversion, so read it knowing that.
- 03Use multi-touch when the sales cycle is long and considered, and you can trust that every touch was recorded accurately. It is the most complete and the most data-hungry.
Whichever you pick, the model only works if the first touch was captured correctly. A first touch recorded as “Web” credits nothing useful.
The model is only as good as the touch data
First touch cannot credit what was never captured. Lead Source records the real source of each touch.
Why first touch and last touch can disagree about the same customer.
An accurate first touch, captured at submission.
First touch attribution lives or dies on the quality of that first record. Lead Source captures the real source, campaign, landing page and full page journey on the form submission, so the first touch your model credits is a named campaign, not a bucket.
See the captured records first touch runs on in lead source examples, or how each CRM stores them on the compatibility matrix.
What each model tells you.
What first-touch tells you.
First touch is the interaction that introduced someone to you: the channel and campaign that put you on their radar before they knew your name. It answers which marketing fills the top of the funnel, and it is the number that tells you where new demand is actually coming from.
What last-touch tells you.
Last touch is what they came back through immediately before the form. It answers which channels close, which is a different question from which channels introduce. Judged alone it flatters whatever sits nearest the form, which is why it is only half an answer.
Why you should never have to choose.
Glossaries spend a lot of words arguing which model is correct. Your leads do not care. Lead Source records the first touch and the last touch on every lead, so the debate stops being a decision you have to make up front and becomes two columns you can read.
When the two disagree, that gap is the useful part: it usually means something is introducing demand that never gets credited at the end.
The pages between the two touches.
First and last are the bookends. What happened in the middle is the rest of the story: the pages they read, the order they read them in, and how long they stayed.
Follow the whole route with customer journey tracking, or see how the source itself is captured on lead attribution software.
Three steps, then it runs itself.
One line of code.
A single script tag in the head of your site. Every form on every page is tracked from then on, with no per-form configuration.
Captured at submission.
The first touch, the last touch and the full page journey are recorded server-side at the moment the form is submitted.
Lands named in your CRM.
The lead arrives as a real person with both touches attached, in your CRM, through a webhook, or in the Lead Source dashboard.
Questions, answered.
What is first-touch attribution?
First-touch attribution gives all the credit for a lead to the first interaction that brought them in: the channel and campaign that introduced them to you. It answers which marketing creates awareness.
What is last-touch attribution?
Last-touch attribution gives all the credit to the final interaction before the form. It answers which channels close, though on its own it flatters whatever sits nearest the form.
Which model should I use?
Neither, on its own. Lead Source records the first touch and the last touch on every lead, so you read both instead of picking one up front. Where they disagree is usually the interesting part.
Is this multi-touch attribution?
No. You see the first touch, the last touch, and the full page journey for each lead. There is no weighted multi-touch modelling here. You won’t miss it.
See both touches on your next lead.
One line of code records the first touch, the last touch, and the full page journey on every form.
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