What is last click attribution?
Last click attribution gives 100 percent of the credit for a conversion to the final click before it. Simple, universal, and structurally wrong: it rewards whoever closes and ignores everything that built the demand.
A concrete example
Someone sees a creator video, watches a product demo on YouTube, reads reviews, and a week later googles the brand name and buys through the branded search ad. Last click hands the entire sale to that final search click, the cheapest and least persuasive touchpoint in the whole journey. Every upstream investment looks worthless in the report.
Why it persists
It is easy, it is comparable across accounts, and it produces confident looking numbers. Legacy habits and dashboards keep it alive long after everyone in the room knows it is biased.
Why it matters
Steer on last click and you will systematically overfund the bottom of the funnel and starve the creative and awareness work that filled it. The account looks efficient while the brand quietly stops growing, because harvesting demand is not the same as creating it.
What to do instead
Use it as a consistent baseline if you must, but validate real contribution with Media Mix Modelling and incrementality testing before moving serious budget. The question is never who touched the sale last, it is what actually caused it.
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