The days of simple advertising are far behind us. A great marketing campaign requires reaching multiple touchpoints across a variety of media. Today, brands use an average of 10 channels to get the word out about their products. Potential customers might discover your brand on social media, research your products through Google searches, compare prices across competitor sites, read reviews, and revisit your store three times before finally deciding to buy.
But how do you know which part of their journey led to the sale? This multipiece puzzle called the customer journey creates a challenge; you need to understand which marketing efforts actually drive revenue versus which ones just consume budget. Enter marketing attribution tools.
Here’s everything you need to know about what marketing attribution tools are, how they work, and which platforms deliver the most valuable insights for optimizing your marketing spend.
What is marketing attribution?
Marketing attribution traces the path from purchase back to every touchpoint that influenced the sale. When someone purchases from your store, marketing attribution tools reconstruct their entire path backward—from that final checkout to every interaction they had with your brand, whether that was clicking Google Ads, opening an email, or engaging with your social media content.
This comprehensive view helps you understand not just what marketing channels drive traffic but which combinations of marketing efforts create the conditions for customers to buy. With accurate attribution data, you can shift marketing spend toward high-performing channel combinations and reduce investment in activities that don’t meaningfully contribute to revenue attribution.
Marketing attribution models
Not all customers take the same path to purchase, and not all marketing efforts deserve equal credit. Attribution models help you uncover which marketing touchpoints actually influenced a purchase.
When you’re using marketing automation tools in conjunction with attribution software like Google Analytics or HubSpot, you can choose which model to apply. Each one looks at the same data through a different lens. Some give full credit to a single moment (single-touch attribution) while others spread credit across multiple interactions (multitouch attribution).
Here’s how these models work:
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First-touch attribution. Gives 100% of the credit to the first time a customer engages with your brand. Use this when you need to understand which channels drive brand awareness.
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Last-touch attribution. Focuses on the final interaction before purchase. This model works well for identifying which channel closed the deal.
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Linear attribution. Splits credit evenly across every touchpoint in the journey, giving you a balanced view of awareness and conversion activities. Use this approach when customers will take a long, consistent path to conversion, and you want to understand engagement at every step of the journey.
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U-shaped attribution. Gives extra weight to the awareness and conversion touchpoints and spreads the remaining percentage across the middle interactions. This model reveals what catches attention and what leads to sales.
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Time-decay attribution. Increases credit for interactions that happened closer to conversion, which can work for brands with longer consideration periods or retargeting campaigns. This can also come in handy when you’re tracking the arc of a promotional period.
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First-touch non-direct attribution. For measuring top-of-funnel acquisition, this attribution model credits the first marketing-driven interaction while filtering out direct site visits.
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Last-touch non-direct attribution. Assigns credit to the last marketing-driven interaction before conversion, ignoring direct traffic, which helps you spot high-impact closing channels.
There’s no one-size-fits-all model. Expect to experiment before you identify which insights best reflect your customers’ actual decision-making process and buying behavior.
What to look for in marketing attribution software
Choosing the right marketing attribution software isn’t just about picking the tool with the most features. It’s about finding one your team will actually use. The best platforms turn data into insights you can act on. As you compare options, think about what your team needs, how tech-savvy they are, and how you want to use the data.
Here are key things to look for when choosing marketing attribution software:
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Cross-channel integration. You shouldn’t have to click through multiple tabs to piece together campaign results. The platform should connect with your other marketing tools, ecommerce site, and customer data platform so you can see performance across every channel in one place.
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Multitouch attribution models. Marketing journeys are rarely linear. Look for software that lets you test different attribution models beyond just single-touch attribution so you can understand which touchpoints have the biggest impact as your marketing strategy evolves.
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Scalable pricing. Some tools get expensive fast as your data grows. Pick a platform that fits your current budget and scales with your business without forcing you to upgrade too soon.
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User-friendly interface. Complicated dashboards slow everyone down. Prioritize tools that are intuitive and easy to navigate so your team can find what they need and act on insights faster.
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Data accuracy. Nothing kills trust in a report like unreliable numbers. Make sure the software handles privacy rules properly and tracks users consistently across devices and browsers for clean, dependable data.
Best marketing attribution tools
The best marketing attribution software depends on your goals. Get clear on what you’re trying to measure, and picking the right software becomes straightforward.
If you want to connect which ads lead to sales, for example, choose software that helps you connect your ad spend to sales. Or, you may want a 30,000-foot view of your customer journey to see what’s working best within it. Luckily, there’s plenty of software that can zero in on the minutiae of specific accounts and provide multi-touch, full-funnel overviews. Tools like these can also adapt to your needs as your business scales. You may have modest needs now, but that may not always be the case.
Here are five of the best attribution tools to help you make smarter marketing decisions:
1. Active Campaign
Active Campaign is designed for small to medium businesses and is easy to use—simply click on a contact and see their path to engaging with your brand. It creates attribution reports with first-touch, last-touch, and multitouch attribution models that help you understand every part of the sales funnel.
Pricing: Free trial available, then plans start at $15 per month.
2. Triple Whale
Triple Whale is specifically designed for ecommerce businesses looking to aggregate their marketing data. It centralizes data from ads, email, and social channels, making it easier for teams to spot trends and make data-backed decisions. It also has AI agents that can answer questions about your data.
Pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at $149 per month.
3. Adjust
With around 1.8 million apps in the Apple App Store and over three million on Google Play, app marketing is necessary to stand out. Adjust is specifically built for apps, helping businesses track their app marketing campaigns and platform performance. The platform lets you switch between single-touch and multitouch attribution models for insights throughout the customer journey.
Pricing: Reach out to Adjust’s sales team for pricing.
4. ThoughtMetric
ThoughtMetric works with Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. It tracks paid ads, email, affiliate, and influencer campaigns in one dashboard. It offers five attribution models, including multitouch options, that help you see where your best customers come from and which channels deliver the highest return on ad spend.
Pricing: Starts at $99/month.
5. HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot delivers attribution reports as part of its larger customer relationship management (CRM) offerings in its Marketing Hub and Content Hub, which show which campaigns drove leads, sales, and revenue. It lets you pinpoint channels that are hitting or missing goals and customize dashboards with single and multitouch attribution models.
Pricing: Free for up to two users, then enterprise-level pricing applies.
Marketing attribution tools FAQ
What is the best marketing attribution software?
The best marketing attribution software matches the tool to your specific needs. Platforms like Active Campaign work well for small businesses that want insights about their email contact list, while ThoughtMetric works for multichannel ecommerce tracking. Different software options have different strengths, but the best will allow you to expand your use of them as you scale upward. Choosing a tool with predictable pricing and a wide range of capabilities is a general rule worth following.
What is the attribution method of marketing?
Marketing attribution involves tracking customer interactions across different marketing channels and assigning credit to what actually converted them to a sale. Under the two umbrellas of single-touch and multitouch attribution, there are seven commonly used attribution models for assigning credit. The specific model you choose affects how marketing performance gets interpreted and how budget gets allocated across paid media channels.
Why is marketing attribution hard?
Attribution models can show which ads people interacted with, but they can’t prove whether those ads actually caused the sale. To understand what truly drives results, marketers need to test their assumptions with experiments or broader performance analyses. Privacy regulations also limit tracking capabilities, and ad platforms often report biased data that favors their own channels over others. Accurate attribution requires aggregating all the data and analyzing it to extract valuable insights that inform strategic marketing spend decisions.
