---
title: "Why Is Multi-Touch Attribution So Hard? And Is Anyone Actually Doing It?"
episode: 1
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Bernardo Alves"
guest_title: "Engagement Manager, LeanScale"
date_published: 2023-04-07
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:09:51
word_count: 1748
topics: ["demand-generation", "revenue-operations", "gtm-strategy"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/bernardo-alves-multi-touch-attribution/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Why Is Multi-Touch Attribution So Hard? And Is Anyone Actually Doing It? — Full Transcript

> Episode 1 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Bernardo Alves.
> Published April 7, 2023 · 00:09:51 · 1,748 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/bernardo-alves-multi-touch-attribution/

## 00:00 — Cold open + welcome to the LeanScale Podcast

**[0:00]** Hi, I'm Anthony. Welcome to the Lean Scale podcast where we talk about everything wrap-ups. Thanks for listening.

## 00:20 — Meet Bernardo Alves

**[0:20]** Uh, Bernardo, thank you for being here with me today. Really appreciate it. I'm excited to dive into some of the topics here. Um, I think we have some exciting ideas to share, especially from your perspective and with your experience. Um, before we get started though, do you want to give a quick background? You know, name, role, uh, some of your past experience, just to give the listeners an idea. Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here on the podcast. So name is Bernardo Alves. I'm an engagement manager here at Lean Scale. Uh, started out my career in customer success, gradually moved my way

**[0:56]** into operations and business intelligence and have really been on that track ever since. So, uh, excited to share a little bit more about how we can cover some of the pitfalls and challenges of doing usage-based tracking and multi-touch attribution today. Perfect. Perfect. So let's dive right into it. I think, um, you know, this is one of the topics, especially with the marketers that we work with. That's really, really top of mind. Um, seems like everybody wants to do it, everybody has an idea of what it is, but we don't see a lot of companies actually implementing this and that's multi-touch attribution.

## 01:34 — What multi-touch attribution actually means

**[1:34]** Um, before we go into deep, uh, could you give your perspective? What does multi-touch attribution mean to you? Yeah, absolutely. So multi-touch attribution is essentially just a way of tracking all of the steps that take place in today's ever complex buying, uh, experience, um, decisions are taking longer and longer to be made and being able to see all of the touch points in which a company might have had some influence in the prospect or nudged them a certain way, all of those touches that happen from first engagement, all the way to getting that signature in the door, uh, is really what multi-touch is all about. Absolutely.

## 02:16 — The car-buying analogy: first vs. last touch

**[2:16]** Do you have a, something that might connect with people listening? What's a good personal experience you have maybe going through your own buying cycle? Yeah, absolutely. I think the easiest one to, to kind of bring it back to that everybody can relate is buying a car. Right. Um, I think very few people are going to just go into the first dealership that they, uh, see in the streets and just look at something, uh, you're generally going to have a sense of what car you're looking for. You're going to do some research into, um, what are the options on the market? You're going to look at safety rating.

**[2:48]** So you're going to be looking at a bunch of information, going to different websites, all of these things that are going to help influence you make a decision, and then ultimately you're probably going to go in store and find some way of, uh, you know, getting that car purchased. So if you look at it from the lens of a first touch attribution, you're likely going to end up with, uh, an ad or a third party website in which you might have been looking at a review site or an aggregator, uh, to get some kind of information might've clicked on that link and landed on the website page. So that's how they would first hear about you.

## 03:22 — Anthony's Apple Watch journey

**[3:22]** Your last touch would be you were just at the dealership and you talked to somebody to get the deal done. Uh, but it wouldn't capture all of the other steps that might have taken place in between of you reaching out to somebody, scheduling a test drive, anything like that might have taken place. That's a really good example, a really good example. And I think the most recent one I have is, um, I was buying a new Apple watch. So, uh, we started doing a little bit more health tracking at the Enrico home and my wife was saying, Hey, you need to have an Apple watch. We need to start, you know, competing against who's tracking steps.

**[3:56]** And same thing, uh, went to the website to look at the most recent ones. I had been in an Apple store just to take a look at the sizing, which one makes the most sense, um, and then eventually made a purchase. But there were a lot of steps along that journey that definitely weren't captured, uh, or, or should have been captured that I'm, I'm sure Apple's doing a good job of multi-touch, but so let's talk about what makes it hard. So lots of companies are tracking activities. Um, but what, what is the critical aspect of multi-touch that makes it really difficult? Yeah, I would say that there's a couple in particular.

## 04:37 — What makes multi-touch so hard

**[4:37]** The first one is you have to have a really clear sense of all the steps in your journey, all your tracking across those stages need to be really crisp. Otherwise you might have signals that are slipping through the cracks. So in terms of organizational and operational efficiency, marketing has to be a well loyal machine in order to even support it. Uh, so that's the biggest thing. If you don't have your campaigns capturing attribution, your events are not showing up in the system. You don't have a clear sense of what engagement happened with those prospects at different times. You're going to have gaps in there.

**[5:10]** Um, the second part is really, what do you do with all of that information? Once you actually have it in, right? It feels very similar to, to health scores in a way in which there's a lot of management of what should I wait this as? What was the defining factor in here? I might have 20 touches that show up under the customer, which ones matter. How do I determine that? That's a science and an art, all of its own. So when you sign up for multi-touch, there just is a lot of learning management and growing over time that is commanded by the methodology. Uh, which is why a lot of people shy away from it. Yeah. I think, I think you hit the nail on the head.

## 05:53 — Who gets credit for the $50k deal?

**[5:53]** I think that's the biggest part of multi-touch that makes it so difficult. So in, in my experience, what I've seen, people can track the activities. So people are usually have a good sense of when a customer joined a webinar, downloaded a white paper. If an SDR reached out to them, they typically have a good, uh, handle on that. I think it's when something moves to a sales qualified lead or something moves to a close to one opportunity. So let's say in typical SAS company, let's say you close a $50,000 deal. Who gets the credit for that $50,000? And that's the part that just becomes almost impossible unless you have a lot

**[6:41]** of technology behind it, or maybe even a data science team. So what I've seen, there are some methodologies. You could peanut butter spread it across the lead sources. Uh, or you could come up with some weighting mechanism, but that's the part where I feel like it really gets tough. Right. And in a way it adds, you know, a human element back into it, right? If you assign the wrong weights, you could end up making the wrong decisions. So, uh, it's one of those things that requires a lot of attention to detail, a lot of management, and you're exactly right. Departments will fight over it.

## 07:15 — When attribution turns political

**[7:15]** So we, we, I mean, we've been in companies where we've seen that turn a little bit political, where people were fighting over the same attribution and wanting credit for a deal. Right. So yeah, SDR got the deal. No, it's cause they went to the webinar, but I met them at a trade show and then who gets the credit? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So what do we do about it? Yeah. So I think for most people, um, especially if you're first stepping your toes into multi-touch, it's a bit difficult to go right into it there. There's a lot of moving parts. So generally what we recommend is if you have no experience in this before,

## 07:52 — Where to start: first/last touch + campaign influence

**[7:52]** there's going to be a couple of places you can get started on, uh, first touch and last touch are not going to tell the full picture, but if you have both of those, you're in a better position than not, um, something else that you can do that is really easy to set up its best practices. You should be doing it anyway, is getting really detailed campaign data in Salesforce, right? Or whatever CRM you're using. Um, being able to track influence by is a really powerful feature, right? You might not have it explicitly listed as, okay, this is the thing that converted it, but if I can go back and look at an event and say, out of these

**[8:31]** people that showed up at the event, how many of them actually ended up buying? Right. I can assign a pretty decent ROI on that event, if that's the case. Perfect. So let me sum it up. Multitouch is hard. Yes. The hard part is waiting the credit. Where do you distribute? Um, and then if you can't do a full weighted attribution model, the next best thing, make sure you're tracking first touch, make sure you're tracking last touch and at least have campaign influence reporting set up. So that way, you know, is that lead source helping move that particular opportunity or that particular lead over the finish line and ultimately helping you close more business.

## 09:16 — Summary: data justifies the spend

**[9:16]** And just like anything, and we'll, we'll talk about this a lot. Um, and data cannot tell the whole story, but it tells part of the story. And as long as you have enough data to justify the spend you're putting towards a marketing source, that's the best you can get from this exercise. Absolutely. Yeah. Every time that you can get some data and be able to make better informed decisions, you're in a good spot, even if it's not perfect. Awesome. Thank you so much, Bernardo. Really appreciate it. Enjoy diving deep on this topic with you and looking forward to the next one. Absolutely. My pleasure, Anthony.