What is multi-touch attribution?

Multi-touch attribution (MTA) assigns credit for a conversion across all of the marketing touches a customer had, rather than handing it all to a single touch. If someone discovers you through a Meta ad, returns via email, and buys after a Google search, MTA recognises that all three played a part.

Why single-touch falls short

Last-click attribution, the default in many ad platforms, credits only the final touch. That systematically overvalues channels that sit at the bottom of the funnel, like branded search and retargeting, and undervalues the ads that actually introduced the customer. Budgets shift toward the channels that take credit rather than the ones that create demand.

What MTA needs to work

Multi-touch attribution is only as good as the journey data behind it. It has to tie every session back to the same person across days or weeks, which third-party cookies increasingly prevent. First-party, server-side tracking is what makes a complete multi-touch view possible today.

Trakt builds the journey first-party and, crucially, pushes the attributed conversion back to the ad platforms, so bidding learns from the whole path instead of the last hop.