First-click attribution

First-click attribution assigns 100% of the credit for a conversion to the earliest recorded touchpoint in a customer's path, such as the first ad they clicked or the first organic search that brought them to the site, no matter how many interactions followed before they actually bought.

It is the mirror image of last-click attribution, which instead credits the final touchpoint, and like it, first-click is a single-touch model: one channel gets all the credit, and everything else in the journey gets none. This makes it easy to compute but blind to what actually closed the sale. More sophisticated approaches, data-driven attribution and other forms of multi-touch attribution, distribute credit across the full path instead of picking one winner.

First-click attribution is mainly useful for evaluating awareness and top-of-funnel activity, since it is one of the few models that gives credit to the channels that start a relationship rather than the ones that finish it. Its main pitfall is the same as last-click's in reverse: it overstates the value of prospecting and discovery channels while ignoring the nurturing and closing touchpoints that actually converted the buyer.