The five-minute story ad that never gets the last click

The five-minute story ad in Arie Scherson's teardown of Smooche will rarely get the last click, and that tells you where it sits in the path, not whether it works. It sends people to an advertorial first. A viewer who buys later comes back through something else, a price ad, a branded search or an email, and last-click pays whichever came last.

The video, published on YouTube on 24 September 2026, puts two kinds of ad side by side. One is 8 seconds long, shows the product and its price, and goes straight for the sale. The other runs for five minutes, opens on a story about a divorce, and says nothing about the product until near the end. It then sends viewers to an advertorial on a page called Cosmetic Times, and only from there to the product page. The video calls the short ads bottom of funnel and the story ads top of funnel, and shows the brand running ads from several Facebook pages: its own, Cosmetic Times and Korean Beauty Tips.

The short ads, the video says, catch people who have already visited the site. That is the buyer a story ad sends.

Why does my story ad get almost no credit in last-click attribution?

Because last-click attribution gives the whole sale to the final visit, and a long story ad opens paths rather than closing them. None of that is your fault. The reports were built to pay whoever touched the buyer last.

What each report shows you, and what splits it further:

1. Last-click reports. GA4's traffic acquisition report and many store dashboards give the sale to the last visit. A buyer who watched the story, read the advertorial, left, and came back through the price ad counts for the price ad. The story ad scores close to nothing. That is what its place in the path looks like, not proof that it failed.
2. Meta Ads Manager. Meta counts purchases for its own ads inside its own attribution window, and on some settings it counts people who only watched (view-through). It cannot see the branded search or the email that came in between, so it cannot tell you what the story ad added either.
3. The GA4 Attribution paths export. This is the only one of the three that shows the conversion path as GA4 recorded it: Paid Social, then whatever came next, then the purchase. Each path comes with purchase revenue, days to key event and touchpoints to key event, and GA4 splits every path into early, mid and late touchpoints. A story ad that opens a path sits in the early ones. It still shows paths, not causes.
4. Several Facebook pages. Ads from Cosmetic Times and Korean Beauty Tips can carry different UTM tags from the brand page's ads. When they do, GA4 can file them under different channels, or under Unassigned, and Paid Social's part of each path splits across rows that rarely get added back together. The Meta Ad Library lists each page on its own too, so even a teardown sees the brand in pieces.

One more thing if the advertorial sits on its own domain. A click from it to your product page with no UTM tags arrives in GA4 as a Referral from that domain, and the sale can land there instead of on Paid Social.

Meta optimises to the purchase event and then grades its own ads, so it has no reason to tell you that the price ad is closing sales the story ad opened.

What to do this week

Pull the paths. In GA4, open Advertising, then Attribution paths. Set the date range to 12 months or more, pick your purchase key event, and download the CSV. Add up the purchases whose path contains Paid Social anywhere, then the purchases where Paid Social is the last step. The gap between the two is the part of Paid Social's work that last-click never shows. Read days to key event on the paths that start with Paid Social as well: that is how long buyers who begin on your ads take to buy. If your Meta ads show up as Organic Social or Unassigned, fix the tags before you read anything else.

Tag every hop. Put UTM tags on every button in the advertorial. Give every Facebook page's ads the same utm_source and utm_medium, and put the page and the angle in utm_content. The UTM builder shows which GA4 channel a link will land in before you ship it.

See what the rules do to one path. The customer journey credit calculator runs one journey through last click, first click, linear and position-based, so you can watch the story ad's share move from rule to rule. None of those rules measures what the ad caused, and the calculator says so.

Then test it. Switch the story ads off in a few regions and leave them on everywhere else. Compare total orders by region from your store, not from Meta. Run it for at least as long as your buyers take to convert, from the days-to-key-event column. The holdout test planner tells you how many days you need to see a lift of the size that matters to you.

Where a read fits

Later, if you would rather not add up paths by hand, a causal attribution read like Causality Engine's takes the same Attribution paths export. It shows what each channel caused next to what last-click gave it, with Direct split back to the channels that sent those buyers. It reads channels, not ads, so the split between the story ad and the price ad stays with your holdout. Every channel gets a data-health score from 0 to 100 and a next step. It takes 1 to 2 minutes and costs EUR 99 once per upload, excluding VAT, with a full refund within 30 days, no questions asked. The first finding is free: your browser works out how many days buyers who saw two or more channels take to convert, and the file never leaves your machine.

Source, accessed 28 September 2026: Arie Scherson's teardown of Smooche (YouTube, 24 September 2026).

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