Last-Click

Last-click attribution gives all the credit for a conversion to the final channel a visitor touched before converting. Everything that came before — the search that found them, the social post that brought them back — gets nothing. It's the simplest attribution model to understand, and for years it was the default everyone reached for. That simplicity is also its trap.

Why it matters

Last-click answers "what closed the sale?" and nothing else. That makes channels people use right before converting — direct traffic, branded search, email — look like your top performers, while the channels that did the early work of finding and warming customers look worthless. Decisions made on last-click alone tend to defund the top of the funnel.

A concrete example

Someone finds you through a paid ad, leaves, and returns a week later by typing your address directly to buy. Last-click credits direct traffic with the whole conversion and the ad with zero. Read literally, the ad looks like wasted money — even though without it, that customer would never have known you existed to come back to.

The common misreading

The classic error is concluding a channel "doesn't convert" because it rarely holds the last click. Awareness channels almost never do — that's not their job. Before cutting a channel that looks weak under last-click, check its assist and first-touch roles. The last click is the closing line of the story, not the whole plot.