Last-touch attribution

Last-touch attribution persists because it's the path of least resistance: most CRMs support it out of the box, it requires no modeling decisions, and everyone understands "the demo request got the credit." For events, though, it's quietly punishing. Trade shows usually sit early or mid-journey — a prospect meets you at a show in March, gets nurtured through spring, requests a demo in June, and closes in September. Under last-touch, the demo request form gets all the credit and the show gets zero, even though the show started everything. Run this logic across a year and events look like a cost center while the website looks like a hero, which leads to real budget mistakes. If last-touch is what you have, use it with eyes open: pair it with first-touch reporting (where events usually shine) to see both ends of the journey, or at minimum track "event-touched deals" as a separate cut. The honest nuance is that last-touch isn't wrong for everything — for short, transactional sales cycles with few touches, it's often fine, and its simplicity is a genuine virtue. The mistake is applying it to long, multi-touch B2B cycles and then concluding from its output that events don't work.