Attribution: How Multi-Touch Marketing Attribution Works in statpx

Most visitors don't convert on the first visit. They see a social post, leave, come back a week later from an organic search, and finally convert after clicking a retargeting ad. Last-click reporting gives all the credit to that final ad and ignores everything before it. The Attribution page in statpx (attribution.php) fixes that by modeling the full journey and splitting credit across every channel a visitor touched before converting.

The Four Attribution Models Explained

Attribution runs the same set of conversions through four different models simultaneously, so you can compare how the credit shifts depending on which one you trust:

• First-touch — 100% of the credit goes to the very first channel that brought the visitor to your site, even if they converted weeks later through a different channel. Good for measuring what drives initial awareness.
• Last-touch — 100% of the credit goes to the final channel right before conversion. This is what most basic analytics tools default to, and it overvalues bottom-of-funnel channels like branded search or retargeting.
• Linear — credit is split evenly across every channel in the journey. If a visitor touched three channels before converting, each gets a third.
• Position-based (40/20/40) — 40% of the credit goes to the first touch, 40% to the last touch, and the remaining 20% is divided evenly across any touches in between. This tends to be the most balanced default for teams that don't have a strong opinion about which end of the funnel matters more.

What Counts as a "Touch" and How Channels Are Classified

Each session in a visitor's journey is classified into one of a small set of channels — Direct, Organic Search, Paid Search, Social, Email, Referral, or Campaign — using the same referrer and UTM logic as the rest of statpx, so the channel labels here match what you see on your Campaigns page. Consecutive sessions from the same channel are collapsed into a single touch, so bouncing back to your homepage twice through the same Google search doesn't inflate that channel's weight. Attribution defaults to a 30-day lookback window (adjustable to 7 or 90 days) — long enough to capture realistic multi-visit journeys without going so far back that the data becomes noisy.

Setting Up Goals So There's Something to Attribute

Attribution has nothing to distribute credit for until it knows what a "conversion" is. Before this report will show anything meaningful, define at least one Goal — a page visit, an event, or a form submission that represents real value to your business. If you run an online store, you can switch Attribution into e-commerce mode instead, which attributes completed purchases directly rather than requiring a separate Goal. Either way, no conversions in the selected date range means an empty report — this isn't a bug, it just means there's nothing yet to attribute.

Reading Top Converting Paths

Beyond the per-channel credit split, Attribution surfaces the actual sequences visitors followed — for example "Organic Search → Direct → Email" — ranked by how often that exact path led to a conversion. This is often more actionable than the channel totals alone: if a specific two-step path shows up constantly, it tells you which channel combination to invest in reinforcing, not just which single channel to spend more on. Pair this with User Journey Analytics for a page-by-page view of what visitors do within each of those sessions.

The Bottom Line

No single attribution model is "correct" — each one answers a different question. First-touch tells you what generates awareness, last-touch tells you what closes the deal, and Linear and Position-based give you something in between. The point of running all four side by side in statpx is to stop making budget decisions off whichever channel happens to sit closest to the moment of conversion, and start seeing the entire path that actually led someone to convert.