👋 Hey, it’s Sundar! Welcome to a  paid subscriber only article of experiMENTAL: a weekly newsletter on B2C Marketing & data science how-to guides, frameworks, and stories from 15 years including early Uber. Free tier subscribers can continue reading for limited preview of the article.

What is attribution

A customer’s purchase journey is non-linear, hard to track, and hard to measure with so many Marketing touch points.

Marketing attribution is the science of determining which marketing tactics are contributing to sales or conversions. In other words, which tactics are working and which are not. The goal is to help marketers do more of the “good” and less of the “bad”.

What is Last-Click attribution (LCA)

Something as complex as understanding which Marketing tactics lead to business impact is never going to be simple.

However, Last-Click attribution tries to do just that by simplifying things. As you can tell from the name, Last-Click attribution gives credit to the channel that the customer clicked on last. It became popular when Google added UTM tracking and used Last-Click as the default attribution methodology on Google Analytics.

Unfortunately, LCA, is often misguiding, lazy, and wrong. It’s not the fault of the attribution model, but how it’s used and the lack of understanding behind it. Let’s look at an example.

Susan sees the following:

• Day 1: An ad on Instagram for a book

• Day 2: An ad on Facebook for the same book

• Day 3: A billboard for the same book

• Day 4: She searches for the book on Google and buys it

LCA would give Google search the full credit.

It ignores that the customer:

• first saw an Instagram ad

• saw ads 3 days in a row

• searched for the book showing high intent

The marketer will then keep investing into Google Search and keep budget there which is great for Google, but not so great for the company. Why? Because it ignores all the other touch points which deserve credit and attributes all of the success to the last channel.

Imagine you’re back in high school and you have a group assignment. The 4 of you work on a project and one person hands it in to the teacher. The person that hands it in gets the credit.

“Um, teacher… we all did the work”

“Sorry, Timmy, I just saw that Sundar handed in the work so I have to give him full credit because I know he did that bit”

“WTF kind of weird rule is that?!”

“It’s called last click attribution and it’s how I always grade.”

If it it’s so bad, why are most companies still using it?

Why LCA won’t go away

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