The question: a new analyst opens Google Analytics, sees Paid Search "assisted" 400 conversions and Email "assisted" 350, but total conversions were only 600. The math is impossible — unless you understand what's being counted.
What's happening: assisted conversions count every channel that appeared anywhere in a converting path except the last touch. One purchase with five touchpoints generates five separate "assist" tallies. So assists deliberately double-, triple-, quadruple-count. They are not additive and were never meant to sum to your conversion total.
The nuance: this is different from a true multi-touch attribution report, where fractional credit (say 0.25 of a conversion per touch) is distributed so the pieces do sum to 100%. Assist reports are a diagnostic lens, not an allocation. Confusing the two leads people to believe they have 4x more conversions than they actually closed.
A concrete test: take any data-driven or fractional report and add the per-channel conversion columns. If they sum to your real total, you're looking at allocated credit. If they balloon past it, you're looking at presence counts (assists, path involvement). Treat the latter as "who showed up," never as "who gets paid."
Bottom line for practitioners: assisted-conversion numbers describe overlap, not contribution. Use them to spot which channels rarely close but often appear early — then move to a fractional model before you reallocate a single dollar of budget.
Credit Where Due
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Why do my channel reports add up to more than 100% of conversions?
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