For most of digital attribution history, the last touchpoint before a conversion received all the credit. It’s not surprising either. After all, for a long time, it was technically difficult—if not impossible—to map the constellation of ad placements that ultimately compelled a customer to convert.
But that’s not the case any longer. These days, we have the technical aptitude and granular customer data to calculate how our prospects become customers. Multi-touch attribution models account for the entirety of the customer journey, not just the last touch, and incrementality (like Pacvue’s iROAS solution) isolates variables to help you assess the true impact of specific marketing activities on your core metrics.
Make no mistake, if you hope to keep pace with an increasingly competitive and dynamic industry, you need the right data to focus your strategy and budget. And that starts with your attribution model.
Just ask Anne Harrell, Head of Product Evangelism at Pacvue. A leading attribution expert, she’s watched the evolution of attribution models from the early focus on last-touch ROAS to the current multi-touch, incrementality-driven climate.
Below, we’ll leverage her experience to explore the limitations of last-touch attribution, the advantages of incrementality, and the iROAS features you need to be successful with attribution in 2025 and beyond.
Last-Touch Attribution Is Incomplete & Short-Sighted
Unfortunately, most organizations still rely on the outdated last-touch attribution model to inform their ad spend. In essence, last-touch attribution recognizes the last touchpoint before a conversion—often a bottom-of-funnel ad—as the sole reason for that conversion.
The trouble is that most prospects don’t become customers simply because they saw a very direct, bottom-of-funnel ad. In fact, those kinds of ads generally don’t perform well at all unless the prospect is already very familiar with your brand. And even then, they take a little coaxing as well—evidence of your products solving their specific problems through case studies or testimonials, proof that your pricing fits their budgets, etc. Extraordinarily rare exceptions aside, cold leads simply don’t convert from a single “buy now” ad.
But despite this commonly accepted knowledge, too many managers don’t want to risk their ad dollars on anything less than a “sure thing,” overinvesting their ad spend on the ads closest to the conversion and trusting volume to drive sales. Not only does this strategy reduce their conversion rate over time, but it also drives up their costs. The popular cost-per-click (CPC) model, after all, raises the price of ad placements according to how many people bid on them—and for bottom-of-funnel placements, that’s a lot.
“One of the biggest data trends right now is the shift away from last-touch attribution and toward fairer multi-touch attribution models and incremenality, which allows you to understand how various points in a customer journey impact a conversion.”
Anne Harell, Head of Product Evangelism, Pacvue
Incrementality Drives More Conversions at a Lower Cost
There’s a better and frankly more accurate way to chart the course of your customers’ journeys from awareness to conversion, so you can spend your budget wisely on the touchpoints and ad placement that actually drive results.
While attribution connects two events—like a touchpoint to a conversion—incrementality reveals the value of that relationship, quantifying what it’s ultimately worth. To optimize your ad spend and other marketing activities across the customer journey, you need to determine first which events are connected and then which of those events are most valuable. Without this data, you’re flying blind—like so many brands are. With that data, you can make informed decisions about your budget allocation, ad placements, channel strategies, and more to increase conversions, reduce costs, and streamline operations.
Pacvue’s iROAS Optimizes Attribution with Incrementality
While not the first to market with incrementality, Pacuve took its time to perfect it, quickly becoming the industry’s premier solution. From initial brand awareness to the ultimate conversion, Pacvue’s iROAS model delivers deeper, more robust insights into the customer journey than its competitors.
iROAS offers:
- Reliable incremental sales estimates
- Unified cross-tactic insights
- Holistic data integration across paid and organic media
- A single source of truth across your digital landscape
- And more
Moreover, while other incrementality solutions rely on a single algorithm, which generally reduces data accuracy, Pacvue’s iROAS is built on an ensemble learning methodology compromised of 3 layered models, using dozens of inputs on each level—making it significantly more accurate and reliable. Our iROAS also leverages data clean rooms (a Pacvue innovation!) to analyze far more voluminous and granular customer data than would otherwise be legally available, because the clean room environment anonymizes it. Add in a direct line to the Pacvue data team to request custom layers and you have a dynamic solution that evolves to meet the new attribution challenges brands face.
“At Pacvue, one of the ways we’ve really invested in understanding the customer journey is building out tech around AMC and data clean rooms, so retailers can share more granular data in those clean room environments.”
Anne Harell, Head of Product Evangelism, Pacvue
Driving Business Success with Incrementality
Data is the lifeblood of commerce, but the quality of your data will determine your business success. Relying on ineffective and incomplete data from last-touch (or even first-touch) attribution models will reduce your conversions and charge you a higher price for them, whereas embracing multi-touch attribution and the actionable intelligence from an incrementality solution like Pacvue’s iROAS will enable you to convert more customers while slashing their acquisition costs.
As we move into 2025, it’s more critical than ever to update your tech stack with a proven, best-in-class tool that gives you a reliable measure of incremental revenue growth.
