Last-Click Is Lying to You

I used to run lead generation for a luxury property development in Jakarta. Nothing exotic — just paid campaigns, a landing page, a form, and tens of thousands of observations about how people actually show up.

Here’s the confession: for a long time, I treated last-click attribution like it was the truth. Google Ads said it drove the lead, so it drove the lead. Meta said it wasn’t doing much, so I cut it. Easy.

Then I started asking a stupidly simple question. Right after someone converted on the form, I added:

“How did you hear about us?”

No cookies. No math. Just them answering, and me comparing it against what the tracking said. Over 4,175 leads, about 2,800 bothered to answer. And here’s what the gap looks like:

The headline, in one line:

Google gets credit for Meta’s work. And it’s not close to an edge case.

1 in 3 leads whose final click was a Google ad told us they’d actually first heard about us on Facebook/Instagram. A Google ad was just the unlucky last touch that took the credit. The awareness — and arguably the conversion intent — came from Meta long before.

Only ~40% of the time did the tracked channel match what the lead said. For both Google and Meta. So in roughly 6 out of 10 conversations, your attribution model is describing a different journey than the customer remembers.

This is the same “can you trust the platform’s data?” question I’ve written about before — just asked the other way round. In that post I compared Google Ads’ demographic reports against our own CRM data and found them reasonably trustworthy. The self-reported source here tells a very different, more uncomfortable story, because it’s not about a dashboard glitch — it’s the nature of multi-channel journeys being reported as last-click. The channel that built the brand never gets the attribution; the channel that happened to close it does.

Now the honest part, because otherwise I’m just selling you an attribution model too:

• Last-click is still useful. For per-channel efficiency — which creatives, which audiences, which placements convert cheaply — it’s fine.
• 32% of leads left the question blank. “Online advertisement” is also a loose bucket, and this is one client, one market — a strong hint, not a gospel.

But if you want to know where your paid budget actually moves awareness, last-click is the wrong ruler. A one-line post-lead question is the cheapest, least-biased piece of attribution data you’ll ever collect. It tells you, in the customer’s own words, whether the channel getting the credit was also the channel that got them. (The chart above took an AI agent a couple of minutes to build — more on that workflow here, if you’re curious.)

So: every lead form you own — add the question. It takes a day to set up, and it will quietly correct every “Google was the hero” report your dashboard blesses you with.

Bottom line: the last click didn’t convince anyone. They’d already made up their mind long before it. Last-click just happened to be in the room when they finally converted.

If there’s a common thread here, it’s that short-term platform metrics are a poor ruler for long-term revenue — whether it’s last-click attribution or whichever number the ad platform is flattering you with this week. Which is exactly why we recently teamed up to build MeridianEase — making Marketing Mix Modeling, powered by Google Meridian, more accessible, so marketers can see which channels actually drive incremental results instead of chasing the metric the dashboard happens to be showing today. If you’re tired of betting on vanity metrics, it’s worth a look.