Someone sees your ad on Monday. They think about it. On Friday they type your name into Google, click the top result, and buy. Last-click attribution looks at that week and awards the entire sale to one thing: Friday’s brand search. The Monday ad that planted the idea gets nothing.
Do that across a few hundred deals and a pattern sets in. Brand search — people already looking for you by name — racks up conversions and looks like your best-performing channel. The prospecting campaigns that introduce you to strangers look expensive and useless. So you cut them.
The channel that starts deals never gets the credit
The problem is that brand search can’t grow. It only harvests demand that already exists. When you defund the channels that create that demand, brand search quietly shrinks a quarter later — and now you’ve got a mystery decline and no obvious cause.
A few habits keep you honest without buying an enterprise attribution suite:
- Look at assisted conversions, not just last-click, before you judge a channel.
- Watch what happens to brand-search volume after you change prospecting spend. It’s the clearest tell.
- Judge top-of-funnel channels on new customers introduced, not on last-click sales.
None of this means brand search is bad — it’s cheap and it converts. It means it’s the finish line, not the race. Grade your channels on the part of the journey they actually run.