On October 30, PPC Land ran a piece headlined “Game: Search and social still argue about who found the customer.” The framing is playful, but the standoff is familiar to anyone who has sat in a performance marketing review. Search points at the final click. Social points at the first impression. Both think they own the sale.
The publication, founded by Luís Rijo in 2016, has covered PPC long enough to know this is less a technical debate and more a measurement problem. Most dashboards still hand credit to the last touch.
Why the fight keeps repeating
Last-click attribution is the default setting in many tools. It gives the conversion to the channel that was clicked immediately before purchase. That makes branded search look brilliant because people often search a brand right before buying. It also makes discovery channels look weak because their work happened days earlier.
Social ads usually sit at the start of the journey. They generate the awareness and memory that later turns into a typed brand search. If reporting ignores that role, budget quietly migrates to bottom-funnel keywords that harvest demand instead of creating it.
Stop asking which channel wins
The more useful question is which channel adds customers you would not have won anyway. Here is a practical starting point:
- Pull a conversion path report to see how often search and social appear together.
- Adopt a multi-touch attribution model as a directional view, not a truth machine.
- Run incrementality tests on one channel at a time to measure marginal impact.
- Set one shared KPI for search and social so teams stop optimising against each other.
Why this matters now
Privacy changes keep degrading the signals that made attribution feel exact. Third-party cookies are fading, platform data sits in separate silos, and every tool gives a slightly different answer. The teams that wait for perfect attribution will keep arguing. The teams that run experiments will have a clearer view of what actually grows revenue.
The “game” PPC Land names may not have a clean winner, but that is the point. The real competition is not search versus social. It is your media plan versus the version of it that never changed because nobody wanted to upset the credit model.
Source: PPC Land
