What is Last-Click Attribution?

How last-click attribution actually works

The model finds the conversion, walks back to the most recent click and assigns full value there. GA4 offered it as a standard model for years and plenty of CRMs still default to it, largely because it is easy to explain and never produces fractional credit that finance teams have to argue about.

The bias it creates runs in one direction every time. Bottom-of-funnel channels look brilliant, because branded search, retargeting and affiliate links all sit near the end of journeys and collect credit for demand something else created. Top-of-funnel work looks like a cost centre. It rarely is.

Where teams get last-click wrong

Cutting awareness spend because last-click says it does not convert. This is the most reliably expensive decision in performance marketing, because brand campaigns and prospecting create the demand that branded search later harvests, and when you switch them off the branded volume falls weeks later with nobody connecting the two events.

Second, using it to compare channels with completely different jobs. That is comparing a farmer to a harvester and concluding the farmer is useless.

Third, forgetting it cannot see offline. In Indian real estate half the journey happens over phone calls and a site visit in Sector 65, so last-click hands credit to whichever retargeting ad happened to be last.

What good looks like in India

Use it as one input, never the verdict. Pair it with a holdout test, a look at blended performance, and a single dropdown on the order confirmation page asking how people heard about you, which will tell you things no attribution model ever will.

For most Indian D2C brands the workable setup is data-driven attribution in GA4 for channel reads, MER weekly for the truth, and last-click quietly retired from every conversation about where the budget goes.