Touchpoint

What Is a Touchpoint?

A touchpoint is any moment where a potential customer interacts with your brand. Every ad they click, email they open, social post they engage with, and page they visit on your store is a touchpoint. In attribution, touchpoints are the building blocks used to determine which marketing efforts deserve credit for a sale.

The average e-commerce customer has 6-8 touchpoints before making a purchase. For higher-priced products, this number can be even higher.

Types of Touchpoints

Paid Touchpoints

Interactions driven by advertising spend:

• Paid search clicks: Google Shopping ads, Bing Ads
• Paid social clicks: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest ads
• Display ad clicks: Google Display Network, programmatic ads
• Video ad views: YouTube pre-roll, TikTok in-feed video
• Sponsored content: Influencer partnerships, sponsored posts

Owned Touchpoints

Interactions on channels you control:

• Website visits: Product pages, blog posts, landing pages
• Email interactions: Newsletter opens, promotional clicks, cart abandonment emails
• SMS messages: Promotional texts, order updates
• Social media posts: Organic Instagram, TikTok, Facebook content

Earned Touchpoints

Interactions driven by third-party mentions:

• Press mentions: Articles and reviews on external sites
• Word of mouth: Recommendations from friends and family
• Organic search: Appearing in Google results without paying
• User-generated content: Customer reviews, social mentions

Why Touchpoints Matter for Attribution

Attribution is fundamentally about deciding which touchpoints deserve credit for a conversion. Different attribution models handle this differently:

• First-touch attribution gives all credit to the first touchpoint
• Last-touch attribution gives all credit to the last touchpoint before purchase
• Multi-touch attribution spreads credit across multiple touchpoints

The more touchpoints you can track, the more complete your attribution picture becomes. If you only track paid ad clicks, you miss the email touchpoint that actually closed the sale, or the blog visit that built trust.

Tracking Touchpoints on Shopify

To track touchpoints effectively:

1. Tag every marketing link with UTM parameters: This captures the source, medium, and campaign for each click
2. Use consistent naming: Standardize your utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign values
3. Track across sessions: Customers often visit multiple times before buying, so your tracking needs to persist across sessions
4. Connect touchpoints to orders: The ultimate goal is linking touchpoints to actual Shopify revenue

Touchpoint Quality vs Quantity

Not all touchpoints are equal. A customer who spends 5 minutes reading your product page is more engaged than someone who accidentally clicked a display ad and bounced in 2 seconds. When evaluating your marketing, consider:

• Time on site after the touchpoint
• Pages viewed per session
• Add-to-cart rate from each touchpoint source
• Conversion rate by UTM source and medium

Touchpoints in Detectly

Detectly captures touchpoint data via UTM parameters on every visitor session and connects it to Shopify orders. You can see which touchpoints introduced a customer (first-touch) and which closed the sale (last-touch), giving you the full picture of how your marketing channels work together across the customer journey.