Last-click misprices your top-funnel sources by 30-50% — cohort attribution fixes the budget leak

Last-click misprices your top-funnel sources by 30-50% — cohort attribution fixes the budget leak

Attribution model choice quietly reallocates your entire budget. Last-click (credit the final touch before FTD) is the default and it systematically starves the sources that warm players up.

The distortion, measured across multi-touch betting funnels:
— Last-click over-credits bottom-funnel (branded search, retargeting) by 30-50%, because that's where the converting click lands.
— It under-credits top-funnel (content, community, first-touch display) by the same margin, because those touches rarely carry the final click — so they look unprofitable and get cut.
— Cut the top-funnel and conversions at the bottom quietly fall weeks later, because the warm-up that fed them is gone.

Cohort attribution instead tracks a signup cohort back to first-touch and distributes credit across the path. It reveals which sources actually originate players versus merely close them.

When last-click is fine: single-touch traffic (one ad, one click, one FTD — pure PPC). When you need cohort: any funnel where content or community precedes the deposit, which is most retention-driven betting funnels.

Benchmark of the day: last-click overvalues closers and undervalues originators by 30-50% — use it only on single-touch traffic; use cohort attribution anywhere a warm-up touch precedes the FTD.