When a repeat customer calls again, which marketing source should get the revenue?
Report it both ways and label which is which. First-touch keeps the original acquisition source and credits later revenue there. Last-touch credits whatever produced the current call. Neither is correct alone. The workable rule: judge acquisition spend on first-touch, judge reactivation spend on last-touch, separate new from returning customers in every table, and never blend the two conventions in one column.
The same job has two defensible owners
A customer found through a paid search campaign two years ago calls the number on the magnet on their fridge. Paid search created the relationship. Nothing created the call except the relationship itself. Both statements are true, and the reporting convention you pick determines which one your spending decisions will reflect.
The failure mode is not picking one. It is picking one silently, so that a channel is judged on a rule nobody stated. If your report credits last touch, direct and brand traffic will accumulate revenue that other channels paid to create.
Why last-touch flatters the channels closest to the phone
Brand search, local map results, Local Services and direct calls sit at the end of nearly every journey, including journeys they had no role in starting. Give them last-touch credit and they will look like your best performers indefinitely, because they are collecting demand created upstream.
This is why cutting an upstream channel on last-touch numbers so often precedes a quiet decline in the downstream ones a few months later. Reading Local Services data and paid search data against operational revenue, rather than against each platform's own conversion counter, is the only way to see the dependency.
The channel most shops never measure at all
Reactivation is a real channel: service reminders, membership renewals, seasonal outreach, the dispatcher who calls last year's declined estimates. It usually produces meaningful revenue and usually gets recorded as no source, or as whatever the customer's original source was, which is worse because it silently inflates that channel.
Tag reactivation touches as their own source. It is the cheapest revenue in most service businesses and it deserves its own line, alongside the customer intelligence that identifies who to reach.
A reporting layout that stays honest
Split every revenue-by-source table into new customers and returning customers. Show first-touch revenue for new, last-touch revenue for returning, and label the columns explicitly. Add a count of jobs that could not be matched to any source and treat it as unknown rather than distributing it.
That layout resists the two most common arguments about attribution, because it stops pretending one number can answer both questions. It also makes the unmatched portion visible, which keeps everyone appropriately humble about the rest.
Topics: attribution · repeat customers · first touch · last touch · lifetime value
Have a version of this question about your own business?
The useful answer usually depends on which systems you run and how they're connected. That's a conversation, not a blog post.