First-touch attribution gives full credit for a sale to the first marketing interaction a buyer had with you. It highlights which channels introduce new people to your business. Its weakness is that it ignores everything that happened afterward to actually convert them.

First-touch answers one useful question: what brings new people into our world? That makes it the right lens for judging awareness and demand creation work, which other models systematically undercredit. But it tells you nothing about what closed the deal, so using it alone will overfund discovery and starve conversion.

Example:

A buyer who found you through a podcast, then converted months later from an email, credits the podcast entirely. The email that actually closed the deal gets nothing.

When is first-touch attribution useful?

When judging which channels successfully introduce new buyers to your business, which is what awareness and demand creation work is meant to do.

What does first-touch attribution miss?

Everything after the introduction. It gives no credit to the touches that actually moved the buyer toward a decision and closed the deal.