Last-click keeps crediting the visit that closed, not the one that earned it
Someone finds you from a newsletter. They leave. Two weeks later they type the domain, or they click a retargeting ad, or they open a tab they never closed. Stripe fires. Last-click writes "direct" or "ads" on that charge. The newsletter that earned them is gone.
That is a wrong object, not a reporting preference. The closing visit is correlated with intent that already existed. The visit that created the intent is the one you can decide to fund, kill, or leave alone.
Motif stores first-touch once and refuses to update it. The payment still shows up. It is filed on the arrival channel, in the arrival window.
The tradeoff is real. If your motion is a long paid retargeting loop and first-touch is a random tweet, first-touch will look unfair to the ad account. If that is the business, last-click or a multi-touch model is the tool you want. Motif is not that tool.
I am the founder.
When a customer finally paid, which visit do you actually want to fund: the first one, or the last one?
Motif is at motiftrace.com. Free until the answer changes what you buy.
The strongest part is defining attribution as a resource-allocation question rather than a reporting preference. First-touch makes the metric directly answer “which channel created the customer worth funding?”
That is the framing I care about, yes. The budget question is "where do I spend the next hour", and last-click cannot answer it because the closing visit is usually the one you already paid for. To be fair to first-touch: it is also a simplification, it just fails in the opposite direction and overcredits discovery. I picked it because it is the one you cannot reconstruct after the fact, so I store it once and never overwrite it.