What is a custom weight?

A custom weight sets how much conversion credit each position in a recorded journey receives. A team might give the first interaction more credit when it wants to study discovery, while still assigning some credit to later interactions.

Suppose a measured path has five touchpoints: a search ad, a social ad, an email click, an organic visit, and a direct visit. One custom model could assign 40%, 20%, 20%, 15%, and 5% in that order. The shares total 100%, so they distribute one conversion across the five recorded touchpoints.

What do the weights mean?

They express a chosen reporting view. Assigning 40% to the first touchpoint does not establish that it caused 40% of the purchase. Another reasonable set of weights may produce a different channel ranking. Missing interactions and attribution windows can change which touchpoints receive any weight at all.

Use a custom model when a fixed first-touch or last-touch report hides a pattern you need to examine. Write down the weights, the business reason for them, and the date the model changed. Compare the result with other models and with experiments before moving budget based on the report alone.

See attribution for the wider set of models and their limits.

Related terms: Attribution, Custom rule