The complete journey behind a sale: not a model, a receipt

Most attribution debate is about weighting - first touch, last touch, linear, data-driven. All of it is downstream of a question almost nobody can answer for a specific order: what actually happened?

What a journey should show

• The first touch, with its source, campaign and click id, timestamped.
• Every session in between, including the ones from a different device.
• What they looked at in each session, in order.
• The moment an email or WhatsApp brought them back.
• The converting session, and the purchase.

Presented that way, an order is not a probability. It is a sequence you can read, disagree with, and check.

Why this settles arguments

When a channel owner says their campaign drove a sale and someone else says it was the email, the journey shows both touches and their order. Often both are partly right, and the useful conversation - what would have happened without each - can finally start from shared facts rather than from two dashboards that disagree.

The devices problem

A journey that breaks at a device boundary is not a journey, it is two fragments. The reason cross-device resolution matters here is not tidiness - it is that the phone-to-desktop hop is exactly where the first touch usually lives, and losing it means crediting the last click by default.

What to do next

Open the three highest-value orders from last month and read their journeys end to end. If you cannot, that is the gap. If you can, look at how many of them would have been credited differently by last-click.