Most reporting stacks quietly default to last-click. The result: the channel that closes the deal gets all the credit, while the channel that started the relationship is treated as a side note.
That bias creates a few predictable distortions:
• brand and awareness campaigns look like they “don’t pay off”
• early touches disappear from performance reports
• budgets drift toward short-term wins and away from demand creation
SQL allows you to flip this logic. Instead of rewarding the final touch, you can:
• order all touchpoints for a user by timestamp
• identify the very first interaction in the journey
• assign the full conversion value back to that initial source or campaign
Once you do this, a different picture emerges: you see which channels are truly responsible for opening the funnel and bringing in net-new audiences - especially important for brand, prospecting and upper-funnel experiments.
If you want to understand who really starts the customer journey, first-click attribution in SQL is often far more honest than the default last-click view.
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