Customer touchpoints: digital touchpoints, examples and how to track them

You're paying for Meta ads, posting on TikTok, sending emails and maybe sponsoring a podcast or two. Sales come in. But if someone asked you which of those things actually made people buy, you'd probably shrug and point at whatever Meta's Ads Manager (the dashboard where you run and report on Meta ads) says.

Ask a first-time customer what made them buy and the honest answer is usually "a bunch of things": a TikTok video a couple of weeks ago, a Google search, a look at your reviews, an abandoned cart email, and finally a discount ad on Instagram.

Each of those moments is a touchpoint. If you only see the last one, you'll pour money into whatever happened to come last and starve everything that got the customer interested in the first place.

This guide explains what touchpoints are in plain terms, which customer touchpoints matter most for an online store, and how to track them so you can see the whole path to a sale and work out which ones are pulling their weight.

What are touchpoints?

A touchpoint is any moment when someone comes into contact with your brand. It can be something you control, like an ad or an email, or something you don't, like a friend's recommendation or a review on another site.

That's the touchpoints meaning in one sentence. A few examples to make it concrete:

• Seeing your ad in their Instagram feed
• Clicking a Google search result for your store
• Reading a product page
• Getting a welcome email after signing up
• Chatting with your support team
• Opening the box when the order arrives

All of these shape whether someone buys, and whether they come back.

Digital touchpoints vs offline touchpoints

A digital touchpoint is one that happens online: seeing your ad in a feed, reading a review on your product page, opening your welcome email, clicking a link in a creator's bio.

Offline touchpoints exist too, like a friend recommending you over dinner or spotting your packaging on a coworker's desk. Those matter, but you mostly can't see them. Digital touchpoints are the ones you can actually measure, which is why they get most of the attention and most of this guide.

Marketing touchpoints vs digital touchpoints

You'll also hear the term marketing touchpoints. It overlaps heavily, but it usually means the touchpoints you create and pay for on purpose: ads, emails, sponsored posts.

Digital touchpoints is the wider bucket. It also includes things you don't control directly, like a Reddit thread about your product or a Google search for your brand name.

Touchpoints vs channels vs the customer journey

These three terms get mixed up, so here's how they fit together:

• A channel is a route people can reach you through: paid social, search, email, organic social, direct.
• A touchpoint is one specific contact through a channel: "clicked the spring sale ad on Instagram on March 3."
• The customer journey is the full sequence of touchpoints from the first time someone hears of you to the purchase, and often beyond it.

So a channel is the road, a touchpoint is one trip down it, and the journey is every trip put together in order.

Here's a typical journey, made up but realistic:

1. Sarah scrolls Instagram on her phone and sees your ad for a linen shirt. She taps it, looks at two products, and leaves.
2. Three days later, she searches your brand name on Google and lands on your homepage.
3. She signs up for 10% off and gets your welcome email.
4. A week later, a reminder email brings her back on her laptop, and she buys.

That's four digital touchpoints for one order. Which one "made the sale"? That question is the whole game, and we'll come back to it.

Customer touchpoints at each stage of the journey

It helps to sort touchpoints by where they sit in the journey. The stage tells you what job the touchpoint is doing.

Discovery: how people first find you

These touchpoints introduce your brand to someone who has never heard of it.

• Paid social ads on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat
• Creator and influencer content, whether paid or organic
• Organic social posts and videos that get shared or picked up by the algorithm
• Search results for problem-type queries ("breathable shirt for hot weather"), both paid and organic
• Native and display ads on news sites and content networks, like Taboola or Outbrain. Native ads are styled to look like the articles around them, and display ads are the banner-style ads you see on websites.
• Press, podcasts, affiliate sites, review roundups and comparison articles
• Word of mouth, including links friends send each other privately

Discovery touchpoints rarely get the credit in a last-click report (one that gives the whole sale to the final click before the purchase), because the person almost never buys on that first visit. That doesn't mean they did nothing. Without them, nobody would be around to click the later touchpoints.

Consideration: how people decide

Once someone knows you exist, they start sizing you up.

• Your product pages: photos, descriptions, size guides and reviews
• Branded search: people typing your name into Google to find you again or check you're legit
• Retargeting ads, which are ads shown to people who already visited your site
• Email and SMS sign-up flows, usually with a discount
• Comparison content, whether it's your own or a third party's
• Live chat or support questions, where people ask the thing that's stopping them

Purchase: the moment of buying

• Cart and checkout pages, including payment and shipping options
• Abandoned cart emails and texts, which bring people back to a checkout they left
• Discount codes, which are worth treating as a touchpoint in their own right because they often come from a specific creator or campaign

These are often the ones that tip someone from "maybe" to "yes."

After the purchase: coming back

These touchpoints turn a one-time buyer into a repeat customer.

• Order confirmation and shipping emails
• Delivery and unboxing, which is physical, but often leads to a digital touchpoint like a review or a social post
• Review requests
• Loyalty, replenishment and win-back emails
• Customer service when something goes wrong

Post-purchase touchpoints are easy to ignore because the sale already happened. But a returning customer is usually far cheaper to win than a new one, and for most stores repeat customers are where the margin is. If you want to put numbers on that, our guides to customer lifetime value and customer retention rate walk through the math.

How many touchpoints before someone buys?

You'll find lots of round numbers quoted online for this. Ignore them. The real answer depends on your price, your product, how well known you are and your audience, and the only number that matters is yours.

A $15 impulse buy might happen on the first visit. A $400 jacket might take five or six visits over a few weeks. Repeat customers often skip straight to buying.

Your own tracking can tell you the typical number of visits before a first purchase, and that's worth knowing. If most of your customers visit four times before buying, judging ads on whether they convert on the first click will make almost all of them look bad.

Why tracking touchpoints is harder than it sounds

On paper, tracking touchpoints means writing down each contact as it happens and lining them up in front of each sale. In practice, four things get in the way.

Every platform only sees itself

Meta knows Sarah saw its ad. Google knows she searched your name. Your email tool knows she opened the reminder. None of them knows about the others.

So each one reports the sale as its own. If Sarah's order was $100, Meta might claim $100, Google might claim $100 and your email tool might claim $100 too. Add up those reports and you get $300 in "attributed revenue" for a $100 order. This is why platform numbers never add up to what your store actually took.

People switch devices

Here's another typical story. Sam sees your ad on his phone during his commute and taps it. That evening he looks at your site again on his laptop. Two days later he searches your name on his work computer and buys.

To a basic analytics setup, that's three different visitors. The phone visit from the ad looks like it went nowhere, and the purchase looks like it came from a search. Unless something connects those devices to one person, the ad that started it all gets no credit.

Browsers lose the trail

Most website tracking runs in the shopper's browser using a cookie, a small note a website leaves in your browser so it can recognize you on your next visit. Ad blockers stop tracking scripts from loading. Browser privacy features, like Safari's, delete some cookies after seven days or less. Shoppers close tabs before a confirmation page loads.

When the cookie is gone, the returning visitor looks brand new and their earlier touchpoints are cut off from the purchase. When the tab closes too early, the sale itself can vanish from your records.

Some touchpoints are invisible

You can't track everything. A friend recommending you over dinner, a link sent in a private message, a podcast mention someone remembers later: none of these leave a trace in your analytics. Visits from shared links usually show up as "direct" traffic. It's worth accepting that some of the journey will always be dark and planning around it.

How to track customer touchpoints: step by step

Here's a practical way to set up touchpoint tracking for an online store.

1. List every channel you spend money or time on. Ads, email, SMS, creators, affiliates, SEO, social. Place each one on the journey: discovery, consideration, purchase or after purchase.
2. Tag every link you control. UTM tags (also called UTM parameters) are labels added to the end of a link, like ?utm_source=meta&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=spring_sale, that tell your analytics where a visit came from. Put them on every ad, email, text, bio link and influencer link. An untagged link becomes "direct" and the touchpoint is lost.
3. Use one consistent naming scheme. Decide once whether it's facebook or meta, paid_social or paidsocial, and write it down. If one person on your team writes "Instagram," another "IG" and a third "insta," your reports split one channel into three.
4. Track visits on your site, not just in each ad platform. Your own tracking is the only place every channel shows up side by side. That's where you can see a journey that runs from a TikTok ad to an email to a Google search.
5. Record purchases on the server. A server is a computer that runs your store's systems behind the scenes. Recording orders there, instead of only in the shopper's browser, means ad blockers and closed tabs can't make a sale disappear. Our guide to server-side tracking for Shopify covers how this works.
6. Connect visits to people, not devices. When a shopper logs in, subscribes or checks out, you learn who they are. Use that moment to link their earlier anonymous visits, from any device, to the same person. This is what turns scattered visits into one journey.
7. Keep each touchpoint tied to the visit it happened on. An ad click belongs to the visit where it happened. Don't copy someone's latest click onto their profile and attach it to everything they do next, or an old click will take credit for a purchase it had nothing to do with.
8. Decide how to share the credit. Once you can see every touchpoint before a sale, you need a rule for how much each one gets. That rule is called an attribution model, and it's the next section.
9. Check that your totals add up, and review monthly. Attributed revenue across all channels should match what your store actually took. If it's higher, something is double counting. Touchpoints also change as you add channels, so look again every month.

Which touchpoints actually drive sales: attribution models

Seeing touchpoints is step one. The useful part is deciding how much each one contributed. An attribution model is a rule for dividing the credit for a sale across the touchpoints that led to it.

Take Sarah's $100 order with four touchpoints: an Instagram ad, a branded Google search, a welcome email and a reminder email.

Same order, very different stories:

• Last touch says email is your best channel and Instagram is useless. It's simple, and it's why search, email and retargeting often look like heroes. Our post on the pros and cons of last-click attribution goes into its blind spots.
• First touch says the opposite. It rewards the channels that find new customers.
• Linear splits the credit evenly.
• U-shaped, also called position based, gives the most to the first and last touchpoints and shares the rest among the middle. Read more in what is a U-shaped attribution model .

Notice that every row adds up to $100. That's the point of splitting the credit once, across all touchpoints, instead of letting each platform claim the whole sale. It's the core idea behind multi-touch attribution , and it's how you avoid the double counting you get from adding up each platform's own reports.

No model is "true." Each one answers a slightly different question. A good habit is to look at the same orders under two or three models. If a channel looks strong under all of them, it's probably earning its keep. If it only looks good under one, be careful about scaling it.

Common mistakes when tracking touchpoints

Only looking at the last touchpoint

The last click is the easiest to measure, so it's tempting to stop there. But the last touchpoint is often a branded search or a retargeting ad, which catches people who were already convinced. Cut the earlier touchpoints and, after a while, there's nobody left to catch.

Treating platform-reported revenue as truth

Each platform grades its own homework. Use their numbers for optimizing inside the platform, but compare channels using a source that sees every touchpoint and counts each order once. Judging each one on its own report means you'll believe you made more money from ads than you did.

Counting touchpoints instead of weighing them

A channel that shows up in lots of journeys isn't automatically valuable. Retargeting ads, for example, tend to appear in many paths because they target people who were already likely to buy.

Giving all the credit to branded search and direct

When someone types your URL or searches your name, it usually means an earlier touchpoint did its job. Giving all the credit to "Google" or "Direct" hides the ad or creator that made them remember you.

Forgetting about touchpoints after the sale

If you only track up to the first purchase, you'll miss what brings people back. Repeat purchases often come from email, direct visits and branded search. A touchpoint that brings in customers who return again and again can be worth more than one that brings in a lot of one-time buyers, so look at repeat revenue separately from first orders.

Expecting to see everything

No setup sees every touchpoint. Word of mouth and private sharing stay hidden. Aim for a complete view of the touchpoints you can track, and treat the rest as a known gap rather than pretending it doesn't exist.

How Soran handles it

Revenue by channel group in Soran's attribution report, on a demo store.

Soran puts every touchpoint it can see for an order on one path, so you can see what actually led to the sale instead of what each platform claims.

• One person, many devices. Orders, visits and touchpoints from a shopper's different devices are joined into a single customer profile, so Sarah's phone click and laptop purchase belong to the same journey.
• Purchases tracked on the server, so ad blockers, browser tracking prevention and closed tabs don't lose sales.
• Credit split once per order. Each order's credit is shared across the visits that led to it, so totals match what the store took. Switching between models like first touch, last touch, linear, U-shaped and time decay updates every number in the report.
• Channel, campaign, ad set and ad views load together, and ad spend is matched to the exact ad behind each order, so you can see which specific touchpoints are worth paying for.
• Repeat revenue shown apart from first purchases, so first orders and returning customers don't blur together.
• Landing pages get their share. Each entry page gets the revenue of the journeys it started.
• An event log shows every raw event as it arrived, if you need to check whether a touchpoint was ever tracked.

On Shopify, orders, products and customers import with their history when you connect. The visit paths behind orders start from the day tracking is installed, so touchpoints from before then won't appear.

Frequently asked questions

What are touchpoints in marketing?

Touchpoints are the moments a person comes into contact with your brand: seeing an ad, clicking a search result, reading an email, visiting your site, talking to support, or receiving an order. Together they make up the customer journey.

What is the difference between digital touchpoints and marketing touchpoints?

Marketing touchpoints are usually the ones you create on purpose, like ads, emails and sponsored posts. Digital touchpoints include those plus any online moment a person meets your brand, such as a review site, a forum thread or a search for your name.

What's the difference between a touchpoint and a channel?

A channel is a route people reach you through, like paid social or email. A touchpoint is one specific contact through that channel, like clicking a particular Instagram ad on a particular day.

What are examples of customer touchpoints for an online store?

Ads on Meta, TikTok and Google, organic search results, creator posts, product pages, reviews, email and SMS flows, abandoned cart reminders, checkout, shipping emails, unboxing, review requests and customer support. They cover the time before, during and after a purchase.

Which touchpoint is the most important?

It depends on the question. Discovery touchpoints matter most for growth, because they bring in new people. Closing touchpoints matter for converting the people you already reached. Comparing a few attribution models on the same data shows you which touchpoints hold up no matter how you count, and which channels are doing more work than last touch shows.

How do I track touchpoints across devices?

You need a moment where the shopper tells you who they are, like logging in, subscribing or checking out. Your tracking can then link their earlier anonymous visits on other devices to the same person. Without that, each device looks like a different visitor.

Can I track digital touchpoints with Google Analytics?

Google Analytics records visits and their sources, and it offers attribution reports. It doesn't see ad impressions on other platforms, and it relies on browser tracking, so it can miss sessions and purchases that ad blockers or privacy settings hide.

Want to see every touchpoint behind your orders on one path? Book a demo .