Last-Click Attribution

What it credits, and what it does not

If a visitor arrives via Google CPC, browses for five minutes and converts, last-click credits the conversion to Google CPC. If a visitor arrives via Facebook, leaves, returns via direct (or via a different source) and converts, last-click credits whichever source brought the visitor in last before the conversion. Earlier touchpoints — the email opened last week, the influencer post seen a month ago — receive no credit.

This is deliberate. Last-click does not measure influence; it measures the source that closed the conversion. For media-mix decisions on a single channel at a time, that is usually the correct question.

Last-click vs multi-touch

Multi-touch attribution distributes credit across the chain of touchpoints — linear, time-decay or data-driven. To work, it requires per-user tracking: linking pageview A and pageview B to the same visitor across sessions. That requirement makes multi-touch unreachable for any architecture that does not track individuals. Sealmetrics counts events anonymously in aggregate, so multi-touch is not part of the product.

Last-click on data without consent gaps

Cookie-based last-click attribution still loses data the moment the cookie disappears. Sealmetrics applies session-scoped last-click: the source of the session in which the conversion fires gets the credit, on every conversion recorded. No cookie required, no expiration risk, no “direct” bucket inflated by ITP. See the full pattern in the cookieless analytics pillar.