What is last-click attribution?

Giving all the credit to the last thing someone clicked before buying.

Last-click attribution gives all the credit for a result to the last thing someone clicked before buying, signing up or getting tickets. It was the default in web analytics for years, and many reports still lean on it.

Its blind spot is everything earlier. The trailer, the creator post or the poster that made someone curious gets nothing, and the final click, often a search for your name or a link in an email, gets everything. That makes the channels people use at the last step look brilliant and the channels that start interest look weak. Brand work mostly starts interest, so for brand teams it’s an especially unfair rule.

Why it matters

It often hands credit to brand search, which mostly catches people who were already going to buy.

An example

Example (made-up numbers): 100 buyers watch a creator video, then later search your name and buy. Last-click gives brand search 100 sales and the creator zero.

Where it misleads

Cutting the channels that start interest because last-click shows them doing nothing, then watching search results fall a few months later.

How Arcus handles it

We show how much last-click credit goes to brand search and email, where people were already on their way. When you need to know what the earlier steps are worth, we test it: pause them in some regions, keep them running in others, and compare sales.

More in our guide: Google Search ads: how to tell what worked