Last click attribution has been around since the beginning of digital marketing, but is it the most effective way to calculate where your sales are coming from and what is influencing your customers? 

Many digital marketing agencies will say yes as a default, but we say no. 

Last click attribution tracks which advertisement a customer viewed, engaged with, or clicked on directly before making a purchase and credits it 100% for the conversion. Many marketers rely on this method of attribution to decide how well a particular ad or product is performing.

Last click is a very accurate method of tracking attribution in some ways— if a conversion can be linked directly to a specific ad through last click attribution you can safely say that ad definitely had a part in influencing the sale— but it is an incredibly limiting view of attribution and it does not take into account the bigger picture of what is going on in your marketing sphere. 

What are the challenges of last click attribution?

Relying on last click attribution only can be a massive mistake for ecommerce businesses. Last click attribution has a significant number of pitfalls and rising challenges as the path to purchase online becomes more complex for customers. 

1) It limits your overall understanding of your marketing

One of the biggest pitfalls of last click attribution is that it doesn’t take into account that customers sometimes consider purchases before they make them. 

Typically, if a customer has purchased directly after clicking on an ad, they’re making an impulse purchase. It assumes that they’ve gone directly from acquisition to conversion. 

But most products and services on the ecommerce market do not lend themselves to impulse buying, and your customer’s journey is a closed loop, not a straight line. 

Consider this: 

You’re selling a product or service that is not usually purchased on an impulse. 

Your customers initially find you after identifying that you are able to provide a potential solution to a problem they have. Likely, this will have been through clicking on a PPC Google Ad. 

Your customers then conduct some research, they take time to look at other options, and they consider which would be the best fit. During this time, they will likely also be seeing retargeting ads, or may even be revisiting your website for more information. 

Once they have decided to move forward with your solution over your competitors, they visit your website directly to make their purchase.

This sounds like a logical customer journey right?

Here’s the problem. If you’re relying on last click attribution, this purchase would be attributed to the direct visit to your website. Last click attribution would not consider the initial ad the customer clicked on, any retargeting ads the customer viewed or potentially clicked, or any other visit to your website as contributing to the sale. 

This means that none of those ads will receive any credit for the conversion in your analytics, making it impossible for you to figure out your customer’s path to purchase.

2) It can give you incorrect or confusing data

If you’re not able to accurately trace your customer’s path to purchase, you will be getting potentially incorrect or confusing data from your attributions. 

In the example above, that purchase journey would be attributed to the direct website visit, not to any of the ads that the customer interacted with prior to making the purchase. So if you wanted to check the performance of your ads, you would be looking at misleading information.

If you’re looking at your last click attribution data to make decisions about what is and isn’t working in your advertisements, you’re going to have a hard time. You won’t have any data showing that your customers are finding your website through PPC ads first, what they’re searching to find you, or if they’re interacting with retargeting in the meantime. 

Your data instead may lead you to believe that your conversions are coming from direct website traffic instead. 

Your ads will also look like they’re not performing, so you may take budget away or make changes to them even though they’re actually the main way your customers are finding you. 

How should I track attributions instead?

At the end of the day, there are no good or bad attribution models. Every different way of tracking attribution will tell you something different.

Fortunately, last click is not the only form of attribution available to marketers. 

There are several attribution models that take into account the bigger marketing picture if you’re using multiple channels for advertising. There is no one-size-fits-all attribution model, but different models can help you track and target different goals. 

Here are some resources to help you decide what’s going to work best for you: 

About attribution models - Google Ads Help 

How to Pick the Right Analytics Attribution Model When There's No Right Answer