A touchpoint is a record of an interaction between a prospective or current customer and your brand. In B2B attribution, each touchpoint serves as an individual data signal that helps track how marketing, sales, and partnership activities contribute to pipeline and revenue.

What makes a touchpoint?

Touchpoints have a few essential attributes that must be true, albeit may not all be available in the data.

• What happened: The nature of the interaction (perhaps clicking an ad on LinkedIn, engaging with a social post, visiting a web page, opening an email, or RSVP'ing to an event invitation)

• When it happened: A specific time that it occurred.

• Who it happened to: Who experienced this touchpoint?

• Where it happened: The channel or environment (was it online, in a webinar platform, in person, or at a conference?)

Note: It's often helpful to categorize all touchpoints as "in" vs "out", separating the touchpoints that indicate customer activity from activity from the company attempting to engage.

How touchpoints relate to attribution

Touchpoints are the raw inputs of attribution. When stitched together, they are the building blocks of account stories. Legacy position-based attribution models will select a touchpoint based on the position it falls in the buying journey. Modern attribution systems will traverse all touchpoints for context and use them as clues to understand what really sourced a milestone of interest. Savvy marketers know that collecting touchpoints comprehensively can help them:

• Understand the effectiveness of each campaign or channel

• Attribute influence to specific marketing activities

• Optimize strategies based on actual buyer behavior

How to handle missing touchpoints

In larger B2B organizations, missing touchpoints are common, often due to measurement gaps, system migrations, or simply poor data hygiene. These gaps can distort the understanding of the customer journey and the broader account story. Modern attribution platforms can forensically reconstruct touchpoints by drawing on contextual clues and affilliated data. For example, if an account executive’s email record reads, “Thanks for coming to our office yesterday,” but the meeting record is absent, an AI-driven attribution model can confidently infer that a meeting occurred the day before the email was sent and backfill that touchpoint for attribution and tracking purposes.

Practical applications

Touchpoints are leveraged by:

• Attribution tools to assign pipeline or revenue credit

• Marketing dashboards to visualize engagement trends

They’re also the foundation of multi-touch timelines, lead scoring models, and marketing ROI reporting.