Beyond Last-Touch Attribution: Find Out Which Interactions Really Matter

Most analytics tools tell you where a buyer was when they clicked "purchase." That's not the same as what made them buy. User journeys don't work in single moments. The campaign that brought them in three days ago. The landing page that set the hook. The recommended product recommendation they added to their cart at the last second. These touchpoints provide critical information to optimize your acquisition, channel, web, and merchandising strategies.

We recently hosted a live session, Digital Analytics with Amplitude: Tracing the Sale, to discuss this very topic. Amplitude Head of AI Strategy, Jim Kultgen, and Principal Product Manager, Enzo Avigo, showed how to trace sales with Amplitude's new persisted properties to get a complete, accurate picture of the purchase journey from first click to conversion.

Persisting event context tells you what works

Take a common marketing scenario: you're testing different landing pages across your email and ad CTAs. The question is which page actually drives conversions, and why.

Grouping conversions by page path shows you that purchases happened on the checkout page. True, but not very insightful. But persisting context, such as "first page visited in a session," enables you to see which entry pages actually drove that conversion.

Persisted properties are an event property type in Amplitude that retain context over multiple touchpoints as users move through their journeys. A search query, a recommendation click, a UTM parameter—each one can be tied to the specific downstream event it influenced.

You don't need to re-instrument your site to connect entry pages, referrers, on-site searches, and other interactions to a final conversion event. You can use persisted properties to define what context to carry and for how long.

Five attribution questions that growth teams can easily answer

With clean data and clear context, growth and marketing teams can understand customer behavior in a way that drives priorities, experiments, and next steps. Some critical performance questions for any e-commerce, financial services, B2B technology, media/streaming, and healthcare brand include:

Set up persisted properties: immediately, retroactively, and without breaking anything

It's never been easier to get the answers you need out of your data. Amplitude's persisted properties are:

• Immediate: You can create a rule and see the change in dashboards, data tables, and any other report instantly.
• Retroactive: Your rules are applied to historical behavior, so you can analyze everything you've been tracking instead of waiting for new data to come in.
• Nondestructive: Your original data is untouched, so there's no data loss even as you iterate on rules.

If you've been working around this problem with proxy data or engineering-driven property maintenance, you don't have to anymore. You can implement and update persisted properties faster and fearlessly with a no-code setup.