Most marketers have a problem with the way we understand paid media performance.
When reviewing month end GA4 reports and client dashboards, it’s easy to lean towards over weighting the conversion to whichever session channel happened to be there at the end.
Someone sees three Meta ads over a couple of weeks, but they don’t click. They visit the website once, leave, see another ad, then eventually Google the company name and convert through a Search ad.
A smarter conversation about brand-building versus conversion
Google/cpc gets the conversion on a session/source medium view.
We look at the report and say
‘Google is working. Meta isn’t’
Except that isn’t really what happened. Google may have captured the lead, but there is a good chance Meta helped create it.
And this is where the conversation around brand-building versus conversion needs to get a bit smarter.
The last click is useful. It just isn’t the whole story.
As Head of Performance in a digital first agency, I am obviously a big believer in performance data. If we’re spending money on ads, we should know exactly what we’re getting back. Leads, qualified leads, sales, revenue, CPL, ROAS, LTV and CAC.
The alphabet sets of endless acronyms all matter in a specific context in a multifaceted, complex system.
But having a myopic view of attribution can give us a false sense of certainty- it’s certainly an easy way out for an inexperienced marketer.
The fact that someone clicked a Google ad immediately before submitting a form doesn’t mean that Google single-handedly convinced them to enquire. It just means Google was the last measurable step before they did.
Those are two different things.
The problem comes when we start moving budgets based entirely on that final interaction. If Search has a R300 CPL and a social campaign has a R900 CPL, the obvious answer looks like moving everything into Search.
Sometimes that is absolutely the right decision. A lot of times it is exactly the wrong one.
The bigger contextual questions are: what made a customer look in the first place? And, What convinced them to convert?
Not every ad needs to close the sale
This is probably one of the biggest issues I have with the brand versus performance conversation. We have reduced every campaign to a final number. Brand campaigns gets compared directly with a Search campaign because Search generated more leads.
Of course it did.
The person typing your service into Google is significantly further down the funnel than someone seeing your business for the first time on Instagram.
That doesn’t mean we should throw money at vague “awareness” campaigns and hope for the best either.
Brand campaigns still need a purpose.
- Are we reaching the right people?
- Are people actually engaging with the content?
- Is branded search increasing?
- Are we seeing more direct traffic?
- Are we building strong signal remarketing audiences?
- Are conversion campaigns performing better as more people become familiar with the brand?
There needs to be something we are trying to move.
It just doesn’t always have to be a form submission.
Some channels are very good at being there at the end
Search is one of my favourite channels for a reason. Someone needs something, they search for it, and we put the right business in front of them.
But it doesn’t always create that demand.
If someone searches your brand and converts, Google may get the credit. But they might have seen a Meta ad, heard about you from a friend or known your brand for years.
Attribution tells us what we can measure. It doesn’t tell us the whole story.
That’s also before we untangle the complexity created when Meta, Google Ads, GA4 and your CRM can all have different views of the same conversion.
Brand creates familiarity. Performance captures intent.
The ever increasing trend is to naturally focus on efficiency: lower CPL, higher ROAS, scale what converts.
But if we only invest at the bottom of the funnel, we run the risk of just capturing existing demand without necessarily creating the next group of customers.
It is also worth regularly testing and reviewing your attribution models rather than relying on a single view of performance.
Look at last-click, first-click and data-driven attribution, then compare those against what the individual platforms such as Google and Meta are reporting. Each gives you directional information. None of them is perfect, but looking at them holistically can highlight campaigns that are influencing conversions without necessarily getting the final credit.
The goal isn’t to find the one “correct” attribution model. It’s to understand the customer journey well enough to make better decisions about where your budget is actually working.
Give the last click its credit. Just not all of it.
Brand and performance aren’t competing strategies. They work together. Brand doesn’t get a free pass just because attribution is difficult. It still needs to justify the spend. Sometimes you need to create more demand. Sometimes you need to capture existing demand better. And sometimes the problem is somewhere else entirely: the website, offer, sales process or product.
So track the last click. Report on it. Optimise it.
Just don’t assume it did all the work.
The better question isn’t only “Which ad got the conversion?”
It’s also “What made them want to convert in the first place?”
