Summary
The Email Campaign will receive 100% of the credit for the conversion. Paid and Organic Last Click awards the entire conversion to the last paid or organic channel clicked before the purchase, and the tagged email link was that final touchpoint. The paid social and paid search clicks earlier in the path get no credit under this model.
Nitin Batra is a Google Analytics 4 certified professional who configures attribution settings, audits UTM tagging and runs model comparison reports for ecommerce and lead generation properties.
Last updated: August 16, 2026
Under the Paid and Organic Last Click attribution model, the Email Campaign gets 100% of the conversion credit because it was the final non-direct paid or organic channel the user clicked before purchasing.
- Paid Search
- Paid Social Media
- Direct
- Email Campaign
The correct answer is: Email Campaign
Key Takeaways
- – The Email Campaign receives 100% of the conversion credit under the Paid and Organic Last Click attribution model.
- – Paid and Organic Last Click assigns all credit to the final paid or organic touchpoint and ignores Direct sessions entirely.
- – Attribution models only redistribute credit across channels, they never change the total number of conversions counted.
- – If the email link had not been tagged with UTM parameters, GA4 would likely have recorded it as Direct and the credit would have moved back to Paid Search.
Why does the Paid and Organic Last Click model ignore Direct traffic?
Direct is usually a fallback bucket for sessions where GA4 cannot identify a source, such as typed URLs, untagged emails or app clicks. Giving credit to that bucket would hide the marketing activity that genuinely drove the conversion. By excluding Direct, the model pushes credit back to the last identifiable paid or organic click, which is far more useful for judging campaign performance.
Where do I change the reporting attribution model in a GA4 property?
Go to Admin, then Data display, then Attribution settings. There you can pick the reporting attribution model and the lookback window for acquisition and other conversion events. The setting applies retroactively to your reports, so switching models reprocesses historical data rather than only affecting new data.
Does the Paid and Organic Last Click model give the same result as Session default channel group?
Not always. Session default channel group reports on the source of the session in which the event happened, while the attribution model looks across the full conversion path within the lookback window. A conversion can happen in a Direct session but still be attributed to an earlier email or paid search click under Paid and Organic Last Click.
What happens to the paid social and paid search touchpoints in this journey?
They receive zero credit under this model, even though they contributed to the path. To see their influence, open Advertising, then Attribution, then Conversion paths, which shows the full sequence of touchpoints. Comparing this against the Data-driven model in Model comparison will usually show paid social and paid search picking up partial credit.