Traditional last-click attribution assigns 100% of the credit to the final touchpoint before a conversion. While straightforward, this approach overlooks the full customer journey and undervalues earlier interactions, which can lead to misallocated budgets, undervalued channels, and missed opportunities to optimize campaigns.
Marketing attribution identifies how much each touchpoint and channel within a customer journey contributes to a conversion. Attribution can assign a weight to each touchpoint, helping marketers identify which channels are most effective. Meanwhile, marketing measurement assesses the effectiveness of campaigns by quantifying their impact with metrics like impressions, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, return on investment (ROI), and return on ad spend (ROAS). Together, attribution and measurement provide a complete view of marketing performance.
A conversion is the action that marketers consider valuable within their app or platform. Conversions vary by industry and business model:
Education: A user subscribes to the app's newsletter.
Utility: A user downloads and installs the app for the first time.
E-commerce: A user adds three items to their cart.
Banking: A user requests a call with a financial advisor.
Gaming: A user purchases virtual currency to use in-game.
Understanding and defining conversions accurately is crucial to ensure marketing decisions focus on the actions that generate real business value.
Conversions are central to assessing campaign performance. Key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with conversion help determine the return on ad spend (ROAS) and guide investment decisions. Conversion rates are particularly important for mobile user acquisition (UA) campaigns, as they measure campaign success and inform ROI expectations when scaling campaigns.
When establishing KPIs, it's critical to consider conversion events that align with your business goals. For example, a high conversion rate for installs is a positive outcome, but it may not translate into greater revenue from in-app purchases (IAPs). In this case, both install and purchase conversion rates should be analyzed to understand how to move users down the funnel from install to purchase.
Conversion rates are also valuable for:
Comparing the performance of multiple advertising channels
Identifying high-value users by measuring events further down the funnel, which informs segmentation, targeting, and campaign optimization
Spotting UX issues; a lower-than-expected conversion rate may indicate onboarding or sign-in problems
Testing development changes; for example, if onboarding is redesigned and conversion improves, this confirms its importance in the user journey
Many advertisers rely on last-click models because they are easy to implement. For example, a network may define a conversion window such as "an impression or click in the past 7 days counts as our conversion." While this works for network reporting, it ignores the complexity of the modern multi-channel customer journey and may not reflect the true contribution of each touchpoint.
Marketers need solutions that provide an accurate picture of how users interact with campaigns across multiple platforms and devices. Without it, decision-making is based on incomplete or fragmented data.
Customer journeys today involve multiple channels, devices, and touchpoints. Multi-touch attribution recognizes that conversions rarely result from a single interaction. By mapping the entire journey - from first awareness through engagement to conversion - marketers can:
While single-touch attribution - assigning full credit to just the first, last, or lead-generating touchpoint - offers simplicity, it often fails to capture the complexity of modern customer journeys. Users interact with multiple channels and campaigns before converting, so relying on a single-touch view can misrepresent which marketing efforts truly drive results. AdShift addresses this by offering customizable multi-touch attribution models, allowing marketers to weight touchpoints according to business goals. This approach provides a more accurate understanding of campaign performance, enables smarter budget allocation, and ensures every contributing interaction is recognized, giving a complete view of user behavior and ROI.
Understand the contribution of each touchpoint
Make informed budget allocations
Identify which channels deliver valuable users
Optimize campaigns based on real performance data
AdShift allows advertisers to move beyond rigid last-click rules. You can configure attribution models that reflect your business goals:
First-Click: Assigns credit to the initial touchpoint that started the journey
Linear: Distributes credit evenly across all touchpoints
Time-Decay: Prioritizes touchpoints closer to conversion while acknowledging earlier interactions
Position-Based: Gives more credit to the first and last touchpoints while allocating some credit to middle interactions
This flexibility ensures your marketing decisions are based on the full picture of user engagement rather than a single interaction.
Knowing how users behave after installing your app is critical. Tracking engagement and in-app spend helps identify high-value users - those who open the app frequently, make purchases, and remain active over time. By seeing these patterns, marketers can prioritize campaigns that generate sustainable value and adjust or discontinue those that deliver low-quality users.
Consider a scenario where a user interacts with multiple campaigns: they see a TikTok ad, click a Google search ad two days later, and eventually convert after a Facebook impression. Traditional last-click attribution would assign full credit to Facebook, ignoring the earlier engagements. AdShift's configurable attribution model distributes credit across all touchpoints, revealing the real impact of each interaction.
Additionally, the platform shows post-install behavior - engagement frequency, purchases, sessions, and retention - helping marketers understand user quality and the true ROI of campaigns.
AdShift provides robust tools to track and analyze conversions across channels, devices, and campaigns. By capturing both user-level interactions and aggregated campaign data, AdShift allows businesses to see not only what actions lead to conversions - such as app installs, purchases, or newsletter sign-ups - but also post-conversion behavior like engagement frequency, retention, and in-app spend. This holistic view helps marketers optimize campaigns, allocate budgets effectively, and identify high-value users.
Despite its importance, conversion measurement comes with challenges. Privacy regulations like Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) have made tracking individual user actions across apps and websites more complex. Marketers must now balance granular, consented user-level data with privacy-centric, aggregated insights to remain compliant while making data-driven growth decisions.
Another key consideration is defining what constitutes a conversion. While some conversions, like app installs or purchases, are straightforward, others can be more nuanced, such as completing a tutorial, reaching a certain level in a game, or spending a set amount of time in the app. AdShift supports businesses in defining, tracking, and analyzing these conversions, helping them focus on the actions that truly drive value.
Individual ad networks may define their own attribution rules, expecting credit for a conversion under their window even if your MMP allocates it differently. AdShift provides transparency and consistency by allowing you to set attribution rules aligned with your business goals. This gives a reliable, unified view of campaign performance while maintaining fairness across partners.
With data-driven attribution from AdShift, marketers can:
Allocate budget to campaigns that deliver high-value users
Optimize marketing strategies based on complete customer journeys
Recognize the true contribution of each touchpoint across channels and devices
Make long-term strategic decisions with confidence
By moving beyond last-click, marketers gain clarity on which campaigns drive real value, understand user behavior after installation, and maximize ROI across all marketing efforts.
AdShift empowers marketers to see which campaigns, channels, and creatives truly drive results, giving the insights needed to refine strategies, optimize spend, and grow your business.
See how AdShift's data-backed attribution can help you understand the true value of every touchpoint and maximize your ROI.
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