Well, there’s First Interaction, Last Interaction, Last non-direct Click, Linear, Position based. And then of course: Time Decay.
The last click attribution model shows the last touch point of a user before becoming a lead or customer. The reason why it’s so popular goes back to the beginnings of the Internet, when analytics tools were only capable of linking traffic sources to sessions, not users.
Still, usually people use more than one traffic source until they convert. So considering only the last click doesn’t do justice to the previous traffic sources used which all contributed to the visitor converting.
This led to the need of creating a variety of attribution models that take into account the previous clicks as well, not just the last one.
Arguably, the most popular attribution model on the market at the moment is last non-direct Click introduced by Google Analytics. It’s the improved version of Last Interaction, and logical step further, as it ignores direct clicks.
Why? Because many times visitors find your site from a traffic source, may it be paid or not, but take their time until they make a purchase decision. They might come back to your site a few hours or days later and convert. So it’s just natural to attribute the conversion to the traffic source that preceded the direct visit to your site.
Now, promoting new products or services via social media doesn’t usually trigger sales right away, but it certainly has a big impact on the visitors. In this case, a position based model (a.k.s. U attribution model) might work best, emphasizing the first and last interaction.
But if you only use social media for promoting your products, and no other marketing channels, the first interaction might work best for you, as that is the only channel that brings clients.
There’s also the linear attribution model. As expected, this model treats all the traffic sources equally and gives them equal percentages from the conversion. For instance, if someone converts after using 5 traffic sources, they each receive 20%. Technically speaking, this is a very easy-to-use model, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect reality 100%.
Last, but not least, there’s Time Decay - the model of choice used by InnerTrends.