Your campaigns are cooking.
Sales are up, the dashboards are glowing, and the team’s high-fiving. Paid social is building buzz, and branded search is closing the deal. All is well in the world.
Until one day, your data says: “Social’s underperforming – cut the budget!”
So, you do the “smart” thing: pull back on social and funnel everything into search.
Two weeks later? Sales tank, and your star performer, branded search, suddenly looks lost.
What happened? You just walked straight into the Last-Click Trap.
What’s the Last-Click Trap?
It’s when you give 100% of the credit for a sale to the last thing a customer clicked before buying — and ignore everything that happened before.
Think of it like dining at a five-star restaurant. You leave the evening thrilled, tip generously, and give all the credit to the valet who handed you your car keys.
Sure, the valet was the last touchpoint in your “customer journey.” But the chef who spent hours perfecting the dish? The server who curated your experience? The sommelier who set the tone?
Under last-click, they get nothing.
Who’s Who in Your Marketing Kitchen
Paid Social is the Chef:
They create the flavor – sparking awareness, whetting appetites, and building demand long before the sale. Without them, no one’s hungry for what you’re serving. In other words, Paid Social and Display Ads build awareness, nurture intent, and set the table for conversion.
Branded Search is the waiter:
They make the final handoff – the smooth, satisfying finish. But they’re only successful because the chef already did their job.
Cutting Paid Social = Closing the Kitchen:
When you slash social because it doesn’t “convert” on paper, you’ve just sent your chef home mid-service. The restaurant still looks nice, but there’s nothing left to serve. Soon enough, even your valet’s got no customers to impress.
How to Escape the Trap
Don’t just judge by who delivers the plate – look beyond the click at who’s actually cooking the meal. The best way to do that? With incrementality measurement, one of the core strategies replacing last-click attribution.
It helps answer the critical question: Would this conversion have happened without the ad?
Using randomized test and control groups, marketers can isolate the true lift of a campaign. The good news? You don’t need to overhaul your entire playbook – just a few practical steps make a big difference:
Run Incrementality Tests – Measure the real impact of ads, not just reported conversions.
Calibrate Your Models – Adjust attribution results based on incrementality findings. Some companies even apply multipliers.
Invest in High-Lift Strategies – Shift budget toward campaigns proven to drive conversions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Meta’s Conversion Lift studies show the value of this approach. In one case, last-click missed over 50% of incremental performance. In another, campaigns that looked efficient under last-click were actually overspending when measured by true lift.
The result: smarter growth, better allocation of ad spend, and a clearer picture of which campaigns drive repeat customers and long-term revenue.
