<b>Why does last-click flatter your best-performing channel?</b>

<b>Why does last-click flatter your best-performing channel?</b>

The question: last-click attribution gives 100% credit to the final touch before conversion. We all know it over-credits the bottom of the funnel — but the mechanism is more subtle than 'it ignores earlier touches.'

What's actually happening: last-click suffers from a survivorship problem. Branded search and direct nearly always sit last in the path not because they <i>caused</i> the sale but because they're where already-convinced users land. Studies comparing last-click to data-driven models consistently find the same channels (brand search, retargeting, email) lose 20-40% of their attributed credit under multi-touch — meaning many tracks the same number of distinct touchpoints across paths and weights them, rather than awarding all credit to one.

The deeper bias: because last-click credit flows to closers, optimizing toward it creates a feedback loop. You shift budget to brand search, brand search 'performs' even better next quarter, and you've now starved the upper-funnel demand that fed it. The metric rewards harvesting and punishes planting — and the data can't see the harvest shrinking until it's already shrunk.

The nuance: last-click isn't useless. For high-intent, short-cycle, single-session purchases it's a defensible approximation. The error scales with consideration length.

What to actually do: before trusting any last-click report, segment by path length. If most conversions are multi-touch, last-click is systematically misallocating — quantify by how much before you act on it.

<b>Bottom line for practitioners:</b> last-click doesn't measure what closed the sale; it measures what was standing nearest when it closed.