Beyond MTA: How to Measure What Happens After the Click

Multi-touch attribution (MTA) helps marketers understand how different ads, campaigns, and channels work together to influence a purchase. It’s a valuable model for analyzing the entire pre-click journey—mapping out which touchpoints helped someone arrive on your site.

But once that visitor lands, the real opportunity begins: What happens next?

In this article, we’ll walk through why MTA falls short for evaluating post-click performance—and share simple, effective ways to compare destination performance so you can optimize what matters most.

You’ll learn how to:

MTA is most useful when you’re trying to understand what drives traffic to your site. It’s especially helpful when you want to:

Once a user clicks, MTA stops being helpful. It doesn’t provide insight into which landing page worked better, how people behaved once they arrived, or which experience ultimately drove better results.

Here’s a simple way to think about it:

When you want to compare two different post-click destinations—like your main website versus a FERMÀT landing page—you're evaluating the effectiveness of two different destinations after someone has already clicked on an ad. MTA doesn't provide accurate insights here because it's not designed to compare in-unit metrics like:

When you want to understand which post-click experience is actually driving better outcomes, these tools will help you measure what matters—so you can improve with confidence.

These tests allow you to directly compare in-unit performance between a FERMÀT destination and an external destination. A holdout test within FERMÀT utilizes split destinations functionality to send some traffic to your business-as-usual funnel and the rest to your FERMÀT Funnel, allowing you to evaluate what you're learning and creating within FERMÀT relative to your previous approach.

Meta's Experiments feature allows you to compare up to 5 versions of an ad with different settings, including destinations. It randomizes and splits your audience into separate groups so nobody sees more than one version, determining the winner based on the lowest cost per result for your selected key metrics.

Tools like GA4 allow you to track user behavior from the moment they land on a page, analyzing their journey to see if they navigate to other pages, leave without purchasing, or return later.

This helps you understand how groups of users behave over time after visiting your site, tracking whether users who landed on a certain page are more likely to return or purchase compared to users from another page.

While MTA is powerful for understanding the customer journey across touchpoints, it isn’t designed to show which post-click destinations actually drive better results. That’s where destination experimentation comes in, focusing specifically on performance metrics like conversion rate, AOV, and revenue per session.

In the past, when most brands funneled all traffic to a single homepage or PDP, MTA was enough. But today, with dynamic and varied post-click experiences in play, testing has become essential to understanding what’s truly working.

FERMÀT gives you the flexibility to build tailored, high-performing destinations. With that flexibility comes the opportunity, and responsibility, to measure what drives the best outcomes.

By pairing FERMÀT’s testing tools with platforms like GA4, Meta Experiments, and cohort analysis, you get a complete picture of performance, from the moment someone clicks to the moment they convert.

Want to get started? Follow our step-by-step guide to launching your first funnel experiment here: 👉 Creating a Funnel Experiment