What is first-touch attribution?
First-touch attribution is last-touch's mirror image: the entire order credit goes to the first tracked touchpoint — a UTM-tagged visit — in the attribution window. It answers "which channel started this journey" — the discovery question — where last-touch answers "which channel finished it".
Formula
first-touch margin (channel) = Σ full order margin, over orders whose
first touch belongs to that channel
Worked example
A customer discovers the store through a social ad, returns via a search ad, and buys after a retargeting click. The order's €80 margin goes entirely to social under first-touch, entirely to retargeting under last-touch. A channel whose first-touch figure runs far above its last-touch figure is doing your prospecting; the reverse pattern marks a closer.
How Saldo Metrics computes it
Journey construction is identical for every model: the attribution engine traces each
purchase pixel event back through the customer's UTM-tagged page views in the 30 days
before purchase, one touch per session, in time order. Under first_touch, the full
EUR revenue and contribution margin are written to fact_attribution against the
earliest touch. Orders with no UTM-tagged visit in the window fall to organic,
as does credit for a touch the engine cannot tie to an ad (an email link, say);
unpaid social visits go to their own organic social row instead; uncosted orders are excluded rather than counted at zero margin.
v_attribution_model_comparison sums the first_touch rows per channel alongside
the other models.
Why it matters
First-touch is the only rule-based model that pays prospecting fairly. New-customer growth depends on channels that introduce people to the store, and those channels look weakest under last-touch precisely when they are doing their job. Comparing a channel's first-touch and last-touch margin is the quickest funnel-role diagnosis available without a data-driven model.
Common mistakes
- Scaling a channel on first-touch alone. Starting journeys that never finish is not a business model either; check the same channel under linear or time-decay before moving budget.
- Expecting first-touch to capture true discovery. The window is 30 days — a journey that genuinely began with an ad seen months ago starts, for this model, at its first touch inside the window.
- Comparing first-touch numbers with platform-reported ones. Platforms approximate last-touch; the two disagree by design.
Where you see this in the app
Marketing → Attribution, as the first-touch column of the model comparison. Choosing first-touch as the attribution model at the top of the Marketing page also makes it the basis of the Attribution tab's true-ROAS table, the creative ranking and the Campaign True ROAS widget.