Assisted Conversion

Last-click reports undercount search. Google describes the problem in its introduction to attribution: customers may search and click several times before an important action, and typically all of the credit goes to the last click^[1]. A visit that started the journey weeks earlier gets none.

Assists also guard against cutting the wrong budget. A channel judged only by the sales it closes can look cheap to cut when it is the one that brings buyers in; what it stops starting shows up later as fewer sales for the channels that close.

Assists explain why a page with few direct sales still matters. A guide that starts many journeys and closes few looks weak in a last-click report and strong in a report of paths. Revenue from such journeys is influenced revenue, a different kind from known revenue, as the guide to SEO reporting in revenue sets out.

AI answers add early touches that are easy to lose. Perplexity says PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in its search results^[2], and in QueryRev’s study 323 of the 6,294 sites read, 5.1%, block PerplexityBot by name^[3]. A site that keeps an answer engine’s crawler out gives up the assists its answers could have started.

In Google Analytics 4, the key events attribution paths report shows the paths users take to complete key events, and which channels initiate, assist and close them^[4]. It splits each path into early touchpoints, the first quarter; mid touchpoints, the middle half; and late touchpoints, the last quarter^[4]. A touchpoint can be a site visit, an ad impression, an engaged view or an email, so one journey can hold several organic visits^[4].

Read organic search in the early and mid touchpoints beside its credit in the late ones. A channel strong early and weak late is an assisting channel: its value shows in the paths and under an attribution model that shares credit, not under last click. Data-driven attribution gives early visits a share; last click gives them nothing.

The report counts only journeys that end in a key event, on paths of up to 20 touchpoints^[4], and journeys the analytics tag did not see are missing from it, so assists read there are a lower bound.

Sample data: an invented site, to show the method.

A sample software company records 120 trial sign-ups in a month. Under last click, organic search gets the credit for 18 of them.

In the paths report, organic search appears in 46 of the 120 journeys, mostly as a first visit to a comparison guide, followed later by a newsletter or a paid search ad. Most of those journeys have three to five touches over one to three weeks. It is the last touch in 18, so it assisted 28 conversions it did not close. The 28 are reported beside the 18, and the revenue from those journeys is labelled influenced.