The ad industry’s dirty little secret

Why are we still clinging to last-click?

Let’s be honest: attribution as we know it is broken.

Every performance marketer I speak to admits it, they don’t fully trust the data or the method. Yet when the need to report looms to steer decision-making, most still default to last-click. 

Why? Because it’s the “only thing we can trust” and “good enough”. But here’s the problem: the data is no longer trustworthy with GA4’s tracking often being divorced from reality, and “good enough” isn’t good enough anymore. Customer acquisition costs are rising. CFOs are asking tougher questions. And if you can’t trust the data, you can’t trust the decisions that follow.

This results in headaches before the morning coffee’s even kicked in - having to log into multiple reporting dashboards first thing to try and make sense of what’s going on across channels. Application of marketer’s experience and logic mean insight can be derived but at a high noise to signal ratio, and with a healthy dose of ‘gut’ feeling applied.

If this is the case then good luck explaining the output to finance. Previously working at an enterprise CDP with some of the largest performance advertisers, like Amex, Levi’s and IG Group, and still seeing these patterns play out left us with the feeling that surely there had to be a better way.  

The pitfalls of Platform Propaganda

Ad platforms have been grading their own homework for years. Google says it drove the conversion. Meta claims it too. If you believed them both, you’d think you had double the revenue. But you don’t.

This is what we call attribution theatre: dashboards filled with inflated numbers, fragmented reporting, and no clear truth. For many marketers, last-click feels like the only thing that’s not made up. But it massively undervalues upper and mid-funnel activity, which means budgets get misallocated, campaigns get cut too early and true growth opportunities are missed.

Why last-click still lingers like a bad smell 

So why hasn’t last-click died already?

• It’s simple. Everyone from the marketing team to finance can understand it.

• It’s familiar. We’ve all been trained to look at it, even if we know it’s flawed.

• Alternatives have disappointed:
  - Multi-touch attribution platforms promised clarity but often delivered black-box models, reporting that doesn’t line up with reality, and don’t factor incrementality
  - Marketing mix modelling (MMM) sounds great on paper, but it’s costly, slow, can only reliably be trusted for channel level reporting, and to do it properly can be out of reach for most brands.

So marketers shrug and stick with what they know. But that doesn’t make it right.

The new performance marketer’s playbook 

There is a middle ground. Multi-touch measurement, done properly, can give you an accurate, transparent, deduplicated view of what’s actually driving performance. No double counting. No ad platform spin. Just a clear unbiased picture of which channels, campaigns and creatives are really moving the needle.

Through tracking on the 1st party you can bypass the Adblockers accounting for huge gaps in the data you see missing in GA4 - giving more accurate foundations - and then bringing in costs to give control of your own attribution that makes sense for your business.

But insight alone isn’t enough. The likes of Amazon, Google and Meta have already paved the way for the future of performance optimisation that’s emerging with AI - where measurement drives activation that feeds back into measurement in a virtuous cycle.

The future is attribution you can act on. That means turning data into action by suppressing wasted spend, scaling high-intent audiences, and optimising bidding in real time, directly through accurate cross-channel measurement.

However unfortunately the foundational layer of getting accurate data back into the ad platforms is lacking in the current GA4 set up- resulting in giving the targeting and bidding algorithms a bum steer, and negatively impacting match rates.

Why “good enough” is no longer enough 

“Good enough” might have been fine when budgets were looser. But not now. Not when CAC is rising and every dollar of ad spend has to prove its worth. It’s time to ditch attribution theatre and demand better.

At Paapi, we’re tackling the problem head-on. We stitch together real user journeys across channels and campaigns, deduplicate conversions that Google and Meta both try to claim, and tie every touchpoint back to actual ad spend. The result is a clean, transparent view of what’s really driving performance - bringing marketers clarity and insight in the first minutes of the day vs sometimes hours spent trawling through reports and spreadsheets. 

And we don’t stop at reporting. 

With direct integrations into ad platforms, Paapi turns insights into action, suppressing wasted spend, scaling high-intent audiences, and optimising bidding in real time. 

We can get the data accuracy passed back to Google Ads much tighter through a hybrid client-side and server-side approach - deduplicating and filling in the gaps on both sides, while driving a leap in match rates.

No more attribution theatre. Just data you can trust, and performance you can prove.