Last-click attribution has a bad reputation, yet many of our customers rely on it for multi-channel reporting. So, I had to ask: if it’s so flawed, why is it still so popular?

Marketing is messy. Looking at just the last touchpoint and attributing revenue or conversions solely to that moment doesn’t give us the full picture. But let’s be real—more advanced methods like Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) aren’t accessible for everyone. And even multi-touch attribution isn’t perfect, especially when privacy limitations make it difficult to track a user’s journey across every interaction.

So why last-click? It’s relatively simple to implement. UTM tags, the technology behind it, are reliable. Plus, some data is always better than none. For businesses with short sales cycles, understanding the last touchpoint can be quite insightful for decision-making—as long as you keep in mind that it’s just the final stop, not the whole journey.

As your business’s data maturity grows, you can blend insights from different methods to gain an even broader understanding of your marketing efforts ( hello, experiments!).

Now, while last-click is relatively easy to implement, we highly recommend setting it up in a data warehouse. If you want daily insights, multiple data sources, and a clear view of long-term trends, a Google Sheet just won’t cut it—you’ll run out of cell space quite quickly. Still, to help make things more accessible for everyone, we’ve created this Last-Click Attribution Google Sheets Template for E-commerce. It’s a great starting point, though with a few limitations:

• 3 months of historical data
• Data shown by month (not daily)
• Limited to 4 data sources (GA4, Facebook Ads, Google Ads and TikTok)

Give it a try! Use it as a proof of concept for a potential data warehouse project, to check if your UTM tags are up to the task, or just to learn more about last-click attribution. You might still uncover valuable insights from your last 3 months of marketing data!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on last-click attribution—feel free to share them in the comments below.