10 min read
The Paid Traffic Truth : Which Way Is Last-Click Attribution Wrong? One Direction
The Paid Traffic Truth — Issue 008
Published August 17,2026 * Data for the week of August 09 to August 15 2026 * Aggregated across hundreds of Wicked Reports accounts.
Last Click Moves Money in One Direction. Toward the Closer.
Everyone knows last click is imperfect. Almost nobody knows which direction it is wrong in. This week's verified data shows the error is not random noise. It runs one way, every time, and it decides which of your channels gets fed and which gets starved.
This week's number
On the same 90 day window, last click gives Google 12% more credit than first click (1.53 → 1.71 ROAS) while stripping 23% of Meta's (0.39 → 0.30). Same journeys. Opposite errors.
01 / Introduction
The error in your attribution is not random. It has a direction.
Every week I pull one story out of the same four grids: new customer acquisition, first click versus last click, overall channel performance, and new customer lifetime value. All of it is first-party, click-verified, and aggregated across hundreds of eCommerce accounts. No modeling, no surveys, no platform grading its own homework.
This week's story is the first versus last click grid, because it shows something most operators have never actually measured: which way last click lies. When you line up first click and last click ROAS for the same channels over the same 90 days, the shift is systematic. Credit flows away from the channels that open journeys and toward the channels that close them. If your budget decisions run on last click, you are not just working with imprecise numbers. You are working with numbers biased in a specific, predictable direction.
02 / Analysis
Same journeys, same window, opposite errors
Here is the comparison. First click asks "who started this sale?" Last click asks "who was standing there when it closed?" Both are looking at the exact same set of purchases. If attribution error were random, some weeks Google would gain credit under last click and some weeks it would lose it. That is not what happens. In this week's data, Google's ROAS reads 1.53 on first click and 1.71 on last click. Meta reads 0.39 on first click and 0.30 on last click. Last click hands Google a 12% raise and hands Meta a 23% pay cut, on the same customer journeys.
The pattern holds across the grid. Microsoft, a classic bottom-of-funnel search channel, gains the most:2.32on first click becomes2.79on last click, a 20% boost from the measurement method alone. YouTube, a discovery channel, loses 16%. The channels that introduce your brand to a stranger get their credit taken and handed to the channels that catch that same stranger a week later when they search for you by name. Now connect this to cost: Meta acquired new customers at$93nCAC this week versus Google's$143. The channel last click punishes is the cheaper place to buy a new customer. The channel last click flatters costs 54% more per new customer. If you rebalance budget on last click ROAS, you move money toward the expensive closer and away from the cheap opener, and your new customer growth stalls while your reported ROAS improves.
Is this a calendar artifact or a structural pattern? Structural. There is nothing special about a mid-August week, no holiday, no seasonal spike, and the direction of the credit shift matches how these channels function: search intercepts demand that already exists, social and video create it. Because the cause is the mechanics of the channels themselves, expect this same directional bias in your account next week and the week after, at whatever magnitude your mix produces. And because this data is aggregated across hundreds of accounts, no single brand's promotion can move these numbers. Pinterest is marked as a thin channel this week and is not used to anchor any conclusion here.
03 / New Customer Acquisition
The full acquisition picture, by channel
Look at the % new column next to the credit shift from section 02. Meta is 89% new customers, the highest share of any major paid channel, and it is the channel last click penalizes hardest. Microsoft is 58% new, the lowest, and it is the channel last click rewards most. The measurement method is systematically shifting credit from the channels doing your acquisition work to the channels harvesting demand that already existed. Meta's nCAC also improved about 4% week over week while its new-visit conversion ticked up, so the penalized channel got cheaper, not worse.
04 / First Click vs Last Click
Who starts the sale vs who takes the bow
This is the week's grid to sit with. Every search channel gains credit when you switch from first click to last click. Every social and video channel loses it. Six channels, one direction of error. If someone tells you last click is "close enough," ask them close enough in which direction, because the answer determines whether you are quietly starving the channels that bring you new customers.
05 / Overall Channel Performance
Where the money goes, and THE TRUE COST OF A NEW CUSTOMER
Meta and Google together carry about 91% of tracked spend, so those two rows are where budget decisions actually get made. Notice the shape: the channels with the best ROAS also carry the biggest nCAC markup over aCAC. Microsoft posts a 2.12 ROAS with a 72% markup, meaning a big share of that return is existing customers repurchasing. Meta posts the ugliest ROAS on the board and the cheapest verified new customer at $93 with only a 12% markup. ROAS and new customer efficiency are not the same metric, and this week they point in opposite directions.
06 / New Customer Lifetime Value
What a new customer becomes over a year
Meta's day 0 value is the lowest on the board at $63, growing 1.56x to $98 by one year. That matters for the story above: a channel that opens journeys with a small first order will always look terrible on a short-window last click ROAS, because most of its value shows up later and gets credited to whoever closed. One caveat that applies every week: this grid blends brands at very different price points, so treat it as a directional market benchmark, not a promise for any one store.
07 / Conclusion
Stop asking if last click is wrong. Ask which way it is wrong.
This week's data settles the direction question. Last click over-credits closers (Google +12%, Microsoft +20%) and under-credits openers (Meta −23%, YouTube −16%), on the same journeys over the same 90 days. It does this because of how the channels work, not because of anything on the calendar, which means it did it last week and it will do it next week, inside your account too.
The fix is not a better opinion. It is a better measurement layer: tie every order to the verified clicks that preceded it, separate new customers from repeat at the order level, and judge each channel by its actual job. Openers get judged on verified nCAC and what that customer becomes over a year. Closers get judged on efficiency capturing demand. When you do that, the $93 versus $143 comparison becomes the number you defend to finance, instead of a ROAS column that grades the closer's homework with the opener's work.
How this week's numbers were built. Aggregated across hundreds of Wicked Reports client accounts for the week of August 02 to August 08, 2026, except first click vs last click, which uses a rolling 90 day window. New versus repeat is verified at the order level against first party order IDs, not modeled and not surveyed. The new visit to new customer conversion rate credits the channel that originated the new visit. Channels without cost data, including email, SMS, organic, and influencer, are left out of the cost comparisons. Snapchat is excluded for negligible spend. Pinterest is marked with an asterisk because it ran on a small number of new customers this week, so it is not used to anchor any headline. The channel labeled Facebook in the underlying platform data is shown here as Meta. Charts and tables carry meaning through direction, labels, and contrast rather than color alone.
Topics: Wicked Reports New Customer Acquisition Cost (NCAC) last click attribution first click vs last click Paid Traffic Truth
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