Determining where traffic to your website really came from is becoming more and more difficult. It you just look at the last touch, it’ll lie to you and often say it was Google. That’s technically accurate, but misses much of the story.
A recent episode of the Exit Five podcast unpacked this a bit, and started with the same general premise. Here is the bit that stood out to me:
“I clicked on a Google ad and then I converted does not mean that the Google ad caused the conversion. It’s a very simple concept. But for whatever reason, this is hard for people to really internalize. So the real question is, what happened to inspire that Google search in the first place? And that is the inherent problem with click attribution and touch attribution. It assumes that whatever that click was has a cause and effect relationship with your conversion.”
It’s important to see this from both sides. As shared above, you need to be careful not to give too much credit to the last touch, as the pieces that came before it are what made it possible. However, without the last touch leading to your website, that user’s last touch would have likely gone somewhere else instead.
Click attribution is a dying metric as we move increasingly into a zero-click world, but you need to continue to push hard on your marketing to continue to draw users in even if that attribution is tough to precisely nail down.
