Multi-touch attribution tracking is a way of measuring marketing performance where credit for a conversion is shared across multiple touchpoints — not just the last click or the first click.  For example, a customer might see your Google display ad on Monday, click a Facebook ad on Wednesday, then search Google and buy on Friday.

Multi-touch attribution gives each step some share of the credit for that sale.  Why does it matter? If you only look at last-click attribution, channels that assist conversions — like display ads or social awareness posts — appear useless and get cut. This leads to bad budget decisions. 

Common multi-touch models include:

Linear (equal credit to every touchpoint), time-decay (more credit to touchpoints closer to the sale), position-based (40% to first and last, 20% shared between middle), and data-driven (AI assigns credit based on real patterns). 

The challenge is that different platforms each see a different slice of the customer journey.  Server-side tracking and first-party data collection — both supported by Seers.ai — help capture more of the full journey, making your multi-touch attribution significantly more complete and reliable.