What is First-click attribution?
First-click attribution assigns 100% of a conversion's credit to the first traffic source that ever brought that visitor to your site. If someone found you through a podcast, returned twice by search, then bought from an email, the podcast takes all of it. It answers who introduced the customer, and nothing else.
What it is good at
First-click is the model that credits discovery. It answers “where do the people who eventually buy first hear about us”, which is the question top-of-funnel work is actually judged on.
Under last-click, the podcast in the example above earns nothing, direct traffic and branded search look like your best channels, and you conclude you should invest in the channels that people use to return to a site they already know. That conclusion is a measurement artefact, and first-click is how you spot it.
What it is bad at
It ignores everything that happens after the introduction — the comparison page that answered the objection, the email that arrived at the right moment. Optimise on first-click alone and you will systematically underfund the work that closes.
It also degrades with time. Recognising a first touch requires remembering a visitor from months ago, and that memory is exactly what modern browsers, privacy rules and cookie-free measurement are designed to limit. The longer the buying cycle, the less reliable the model becomes.
When to use it
- New products where the honest question is “does anyone find us at all”.
- Judging brand, sponsorship, community and content work, which rarely convert on the visit they earn.
- As a deliberate pair with last-click: run both, and treat the gap between them as the map of your funnel rather than as an error to reconcile.
sonex exposes first-click alongside last-click and linear in the Attribution report, over a conversion event you define, so the same sales can be read through more than one model without re-instrumenting anything.