Nobody performed differently. The credit moved.

Take every order in the trailing 90 days and give 100% of the revenue to the first click that touched it. Then run it again and give 100% to the last click. Same orders, same revenue, same spend in the denominator. The only thing that changes is who gets paid on paper. Here is what that swap does to each channel, with every channel indexed to its own first click result so you can see the direction rather than the absolute level. 

Meta loses 30% of its measured return on the switch. Google gains 12% and Microsoft gains 22%. YouTube loses 16%. The pattern is not random and it is not about ad quality. Social channels get found early in a buying decision, and search gets typed in at the end, so a last click model quietly hands social’s work to search and calls it search performance. The acquisition grid says the same thing from the other direction: 90% of Meta’s customers this week were brand new, against 66% on Google and 58% on Microsoft. The channel bringing you the most first time buyers is the channel last click punishes hardest.

Is this a calendar effect? The first week of August is a quiet stretch, past the July promo cycle and not yet into back to school and Labor Day, so a soft social week would be an easy explanation. I do not think that is what this is. The first click versus last click comparison runs on a rolling 90 day window, not on the week, and the direction of the gap has been consistent: prospecting channels open sales and search closes them. That makes it structural, and structural means it will be true again next week. The number I would treat as genuinely calendar sensitive is Google’s nCAC, up 12% week over week to $148, with the click price up about 5% and new customer conversion down about 4%. That is a mix and auction move worth watching, not a verdict.

03 / New Customer Acquisition 

The full acquisition picture, by channel

Read the last two columns together. Meta converts new visits to new customers at 2.5% and delivers new customers at $96, and 90% of what it delivers is a first time buyer. Google converts at 2.3% but a new customer costs $148, and a third of its customers were already yours. Microsoft is the most expensive new customer in the set at $160 and the least new at 58%. YouTube and TikTok are prospecting channels that are honest about it: 82% and 77% new, at $395 and $344. Pinterest is marked with an asterisk because it produced very few new customers this week, so its rates swing wildly and it anchors nothing in this issue. 

04 / First Click vs Last Click 

Who starts the sale vs who takes the bow

The credit gap column is last click minus first click. Negative means the channel starts sales it does not get paid for. Meta and YouTube are both under credited, Google and Microsoft are both over credited, and TikTok is close to even. Microsoft has the widest single gap at 0.56, which is a good reminder that a 3.07 ROAS on a closing channel is not the same claim as a 3.07 ROAS on a channel that found the customer. If you only ever look at one of these two columns, you are not measuring performance, you are choosing a winner in advance. 

 Rank by ROAS and the new-customer share runs the other way

Take this week's channels and line them up by ROAS, best to worst. Microsoft leads at 2.76, then Google at 1.54, then the video and social channels trail with Meta at 0.51 and TikTok at 0.27. Standard picture. Now add one column next to it: the share of each channel's customers who are actually new to the brand.

The two columns point in opposite directions. Microsoft, the ROAS leader, is only 59% new. Google is 68% new. Meta, near the bottom on ROAS, is 89% new. YouTube is 85%. The higher a channel sits on ROAS, the smaller the fraction of its customers who are people you did not already have.

This is not a coincidence, it is how the metric is built. A channel like Google or Microsoft captures a lot of demand at the moment of purchase, and a good chunk of that demand is existing customers coming back to buy again. Those repeat orders are cheap to win and they land in the channel's revenue, so its ROAS looks strong. Meta and the video channels spend most of their effort in front of people who have never bought from you, which is harder and converts lower, so their ROAS looks weak even though they are doing the actual work of growing the business.

Put plainly, ROAS quietly rewards a channel for reselling to people you already have. The two dominant channels this week make the point on their own. Google's ROAS is three times Meta's, but roughly a third of Google's customers are repeat buyers, against barely one in ten on Meta. If you shift budget toward the higher ROAS number, you are partly paying to harvest demand you would likely have captured anyway, and starving the channel bringing in new humans.

The honest caveat, because this cuts both ways. A high repeat share is not a sin, closing existing demand efficiently is a real job and someone has to do it. The point is not that Google is bad and Meta is good. It is that ROAS alone cannot tell you which job a channel is doing, and if growth is your goal, the share of new customers belongs right next to the ROAS number, not three columns away. This is a quiet, no-drama week across the board, so read this as a standing structural feature of the data, not a one-week event.

03 / New Customer Acquisition 

The full acquisition picture, by channel

 Sorted by new share this time, so the pattern from the chart reads top to bottom. Meta and the video channels sit up top doing the prospecting, and by the time you reach the bottom of the list you are looking at the channels with the strongest ROAS. Meta held steady with conversion up a couple of points, the leveling off mentioned earlier. YouTube and TikTok conversion slipped on small volume, so treat those as wobbles. Pinterest ran thin again and carries an asterisk. 

04 / First Click vs Last Click 

Who starts the sale vs who takes the bow

This grid reinforces the same idea from a different direction. The channels that close, Google and Microsoft, gain ROAS on the last click model, the one closest to what platforms report. The channels that open, Meta and Pinterest, lose it. So the channel doing the most new customer work is also the one most likely to be under credited when you look at platform numbers. Two ways of measuring, same conclusion about who gets shortchanged.