Last Click Attribution is Flawed, Is there another way?

Are we really giving our marketing data a fair judgment if we're just looking at the last-click attribution? Last Click Attribution is Flawed...

In the arts and heritage world, it's common to lean on the industry-standard ROAS to measure success. The usual approach is a straightforward 'last-click' model, which is to spend £1 on an advert, expect to see £2 come back, and hope you can trace it all neatly to that one ad.

But if we have a good dig into how people actually behave, who really clicks on an advert and buys a ticket there and then?

I don't.

I go and check my calendar first, speak to the person I'd like to go with, AND THEN I go back directly to the website later.

With privacy settings tightening up, tracking every single purchase across all those different touchpoints is getting trickier, especially for niche arts audiences. So, relying on 'last-click' alone can get itself in a bit of a pickle.

To really look after your revenue, it's worth shifting towards a more probabilistic and contextual model by looking at the overall uplift in ticket sales across the whole campaign window, rather than just the last click.

The Strategy: By testing the waters with a lower initial ad spend (e.g., £100 per concert), you can establish true effectiveness before you attempt to scale. This ensures your investment is only ever increased in successful, data-validated channels. So, are we pouring money into a leaky last-click bucket, or are we building a strategy that actually reflects how people make decisions?