How can you tell what works when it comes to marketing your brand online? There are countless different types of digital marketing strategies—from SEO and cost-per-click to email marketing and paid ads—but which ones are best suited to turning customer interest into customer sales? Last click attribution is one of the easiest and most popular marketing metrics you can use to help answer these questions.
In this beginner’s marketing guide to last click attribution, I’ll walk you through the easiest-to-use attribution model, discussing its pros and cons, alternatives, and everyday applications through real-world examples from my time as a digital marketer at beefound.agency.
Skip to:
- What is marketing attribution & why is it important?
- Explaining last click attribution
- Why marketers have tended to prefer last click attribution
- A word on tracking traffic to your website
- Alternative marketing attribution models and their applications
- Conclusion: The merits of using a blended approach
What is marketing attribution and why is it important?
Before we dive into last click attribution itself, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves why attribution is so important in the first place.
Marketing attribution is the process of determining which marketing channel leads to each of your conversions online. ‘Conversion’ here can refer to a website visitor converting to a subscriber, for example, or to a follower, or to a customer through an online sale. By attributing—or crediting—each conversion to a particular marketing channel, brands are able to assess which parts of their digital marketing strategies are generating the highest revenue and/or conversion rate. With this info to hand, digital marketing strategies can then be iteratively improved upon, enhancing both conversion rates and turnover for your business.
Marketing attribution: an example
Let’s say internet user Heather does a Google search for ‘bathroom tiles’ because she’s been thinking about redecorating for a while. At the top of the first search engine results page (SERP), she sees a link to your local interior design store’s ‘bathroom tiles’ page, but doesn’t yet click on it—she’s just assessing the lie of the land.
A few days later, one of your paid ads on Instagram pops up on Heather’s feed, reminding her of your brand and her desire for bathroom tiles—this time, Heather likes what she sees from a name she now recognises, and so she follows your business’s Instagram page. Still, she doesn’t buy anything.
Finally, a few weeks later, Heather has the time to sit down and properly shop for the tiles she wants. She navigates to your Instagram page from her ‘Following’ list and uses the link in your bio to visit your website, where she purchases £500 worth of bathroom tiles.
Heather has been ‘converted’ from an everyday internet user, who’d never heard of your business before, to a satisfied customer.
Along Heather’s journey to becoming a customer of yours, she was met with three marketing channels, or ‘touchpoints’: your ranking on Google SERPs, your Instagram paid ad, and the link in your Instagram bio.
Marketing attribution asks, Which of these touchpoints should the final conversion be attributed to? All of them, some of them, or just one of them?
Explaining last click attribution
Last click attribution is one of the most commonly used models for crediting touch points—also known as ‘clicks’—with conversion successes. It is often the default marketing attribution model for advertisers working with Google Ads, for example, and is particularly popular for measuring ‘bottom-of-the-funnel’ conversions like sales.
According to the ‘last click’ model of marketing attribution, the last touch point or click that a user interacts with is given full credit for their subsequent conversion. To use the example above, Heather’s conversion (the £500 purchase of bathroom tiles) would, under last click attribution, be credited exclusively to the link in the business’s Instagram bio, since this was the last ‘click’ she made before buying.
Why marketers have tended to prefer last click attribution
The vast majority of online marketers use last click attribution to analyse the performance of their campaigns, but why? In a nutshell, because it’s easy to use. There are other benefits to last click, but the main one is that it’s straightforward to implement and draws a clear line between clicks and sales.
The pros and cons of last click attribution
Ironically, though most marketers use last click attribution, only 1 in 5 of them is actually confident that it works. The majority of those who credit their conversions using a last click model believe it to be too limited for exclusive use in the modern era—because as our digital lives have become more complex, so too has the customer’s journey.
Advantages of last click
- Simplicity: Last click attribution is easy to set up and easy to understand; you simply make a record of the links that direct converting customers to your website and, over time, identify those links which are performing best.
- Clear cause-and-effect: Last click attribution draws a clear line between the final sale and the click that led to it. Which is why I especially like to use last click attribution when working with beefound.agency clients on their landing-page lead generation, for example.
- Note: Just as last click attribution can draw a line between click and sale, so too can it identify clicks that didn’t convert—leading to an abandoned basket instead, for example—and therefore could be improved.
- Best for sales conversions: If the most important type of conversion to your marketing model is sales, then last click attribution is useful because it focuses on those touch points that lead directly to revenue generation.
Disadvantages of last click
- Overly-simplistic: The customer journey is no longer as straightforward as it was pre-internet, or even pre-social media. Attributing a conversion entirely to the last touch point on that journey can, therefore, be too simplistic—too narrow of a focus—to tell the marketer much about the effectiveness of their overall efforts.
- Ignores all other types of conversions: Because last click attribution focuses only on clicks which lead directly to sales, all the other types of conversions are ignored. For example, even if someone subscribes to your e-newsletter, follows you on X, and has seen your site on Google SERPs, if the last thing they click before buying from you is one of your Facebook Ads, last click attribution would credit Facebook Ads with full responsibility for the sale.
- May misinform marketing investment decisions: The most effective digital marketing campaigns use all the tools in the toolbox, with the knowledge that a combination will create the widest mouth for their marketing funnel—and with the understanding that customer retention requires a multitude of touch points. Because last click places full emphasis on the touchpoints which lead directly to sales, this nuance can be overlooked, and as a result, funds may be diverted from marketing channels which have indirectly contributed to the conversion.
A word on tracking traffic to your website
For any marketing attribution model to work, it’s worth noting that you’ll need to be able to accurately and compliantly track your customers’ digital journey—customer tracking is how you tell which links they’ve interacted with, and which was the last one which pushed them to convert.
Traditionally, client-side tracking has been used for this purpose, which is what’s happening anytime you visit a website and have to choose which cookies to accept.
Nowadays, however, I’ve tended to find there’s more of a ‘buzz’ around server-side tracking, because of its cookie-less ability to track customers whilst adhering to data privacy laws, even if those customers are covering their tracks with a VPN.
Alternative marketing attribution models and their applications
Last click attribution may be the most commonly used model for crediting clicks with conversions, but it isn’t the only one. Let’s take a look at alternative models and how they compare to last click.
First click attribution
First click attribution is the opposite to last click. As you might have already guessed, first click attribution credits the first touch point between your brand and customer with that customer’s eventual conversion.
The first click vs last click attribution model
First click and last click marketing attribution models are not quite as different as they seem.
First click attribution works on the assumption that the most important ‘click’ of the customer journey is the one introducing them to your brand in the first place. In other words, first click attribution tells marketers that their brand’s first impression is key to generating sales.
Last click attribution, of course, tells marketers that it is their last impression, which is most directly linked to revenue.
Both models, however, limit their focus to one single touch point—either first or last—making them, in some sense, equally flawed.
Linear attribution
Linear attribution is the simplest type of multi-point attribution model: i.e., one which credits multiple clicks with the final conversion. A linear attribution model credits each of the touchpoints your customer interacts with, prior to a conversion, equally.
Using the example given above, this would mean that the SERPs link Heather saw would be given the same credit for her eventual bathroom tiles purchase as the Instagram ad and the link in the brand’s bio.
Compared to last click, linear attribution presents a broader picture of the customer journey and the effectiveness of a business’s marketing campaigns. However, some nuance is still lost because of the equal attribution of credit across the board.
Time decay attribution
Another multi-point model, time decay attribution works on the principle that the closer a touch point is to conversion, the more impact it has had on the final sale.
For example, touch points which raise brand awareness would be deemed less impactful on revenue generation than those which redirect a prospective customer straight to your web shop.
Compared to last click attribution, the time decay model provides a more nuanced and balanced analysis of your marketing efforts whilst continuing to prioritise revenue generation as the key metric of success.
Positions-based attribution
Last but not least, there’s positions-based attribution, which gives equal credit to both first and last clicks.
For example, if you are first introduced to a makeup brand’s offering via a Google Ad, then see their makeup kits advertised on Facebook, and finally buy some lipstick from the brand’s site after following a link on a YouTube makeup tutorial, positions-based attribution would highlight both the Google Ad and YouTube link as being equally responsible for the sale.
Positions-based attribution can, therefore, be a ‘best of both worlds’ alternative to using either the last click or first click model.
Conclusion: How to attribute your marketing conversions using a blended approach
Last click attribution is an easy marketing attribution model for beginner marketers and small business owners to use, but on its own it is flawed. As a single touch point model, it places full emphasis on the final interaction of a customer with your brand, whilst ignoring the impact all other conversions and clicks have had on the customer journey.
Marketer’s using last click attribution may be tempted to invest heavily in Google Ads to drive their conversion rate, for example, diverting funds away from strategies like SEO backlinks, which don’t have a high last-click attribution score. Yet without the SEO groundwork to raise brand awareness in the first place, those Google Ads may wind up generating fewer conversions than they did before, despite the higher investment.
Though I’ve found last click attribution to be useful as a starting point for my clients—especially when sales are the driving focus of a marketing campaign—I would always suggest using a blended approach to attribution instead.
A blended approach uses a combination of attribution models—depending on your preferred conversion metric (e.g., sales, followers, leads, subscriptions)—in addition to some form of data-driven customer tracking, which also considers non-click impressions, like views. This way, you can paint the clearest possible picture of your customer journey, considering holistically all of the elements which go into bringing them across the finish line.
For more on attribution marketing, why not check out our blog on Google Ads’ enhanced conversions or the beefound.agency guide to customer tracking in general.
