As creator marketing has matured, it has had a transformative effect on what happens before conversion. That means that, while last click is still relevant, and it still tells you something useful about how a sale happened, it no longer tells you enough on its own. In other words, brands need a fuller view of how demand is built, not just where it lands.
Intent is plugging the consideration gap
Affiliate marketing works really well when a customer already has intent. I tend to think of it as “intent marketing,” because it performs best when somebody already knows they want to buy something and is looking for help narrowing down the choice. In that moment, trusted sources such as blogs, product reviews, and affiliate environments can play a very direct role in getting the customer over the line.
Take a simple shopping moment: looking for a Mother’s Day gift, or the right summer top. A customer may already know the kind of product they want, and they may even recognise several of the brands that appear in a list or review. In that situation, the final click is important because it helps convert demand that already exists, and affiliate activity is very good at capturing it.
Where things change is when the customer has the intent to buy, but doesn’t yet have any reason to choose your brand. That’s where creators become especially valuable, not as a substitute for affiliates, but as a complementary channel. They can take a buyer from not knowing you exist at all, to actively considering you, which then gives lower-funnel activity a far better chance of working.
A new role is emerging in the middle of the funnel
Creators operate across the funnel, but they don’t all do the same job. Some are really effective at driving awareness and can drop a product, a trend, or even a whole category into public conversation very quickly. We can see that in the kind of viral moments which suddenly make everybody talk about the same thing, such as the Japanese cheesecake trend that led to Lotus Biscoff selling out everywhere. Other creators can help close a sale as well — especially those who focus on discounts and deals.
The most interesting group, though, sits in the middle. These are the creators who move a customer from, “I know this exists,” to, “I should seriously consider this brand,” and that role is becoming more important as longer content, such as YouTube videos, podcasts, longer TikToks and richer social formats, give people more room to explain, compare, and persuade.
That’s why the traditional distinction between awareness, consideration, and conversion has become less useful in practice. Many large organisations still divide those jobs between different teams, with branding and PR on one side, and performance on the other. Creator marketing now cuts across those lines, and the brands getting the best results are usually the ones pooling those budgets and priorities, instead of treating each stage of the journey as somebody else’s territory.
A connected journey needs connected measurement
Once you accept that creators can influence what happens before the final click, you need a way to measure more touchpoints. The real question becomes how each channel contributes to the bottom line, and what role it plays in moving the customer forward. It’s not enough to say that content generated views — or even that it generated traffic — if you can’t connect that activity to consideration, conversion, revenue, average order value, or whether a partner is bringing in new customers.
This is where a lot of brands still struggle, because their data is scattered across different systems. One tool shows engagement, another shows clicks, another shows conversions, and another handles payments. This leads to fragmented reporting and ownership, and makes it much harder to see the real contribution that creator activity is making before conversion.
The operational burden is just as important. Once you start working with, say, 20 or 25 creators on a campaign, and repeat that several times a year, you’re not only managing content, but contracts, invoices, VAT questions, currencies, and compliance. Payout models may also mix fixed fees with performance-based commission. If that work sits in spreadsheets, screenshots, manual uploads, or payment tools that add charges of 2-5%, the programme becomes harder to scale, evaluate, and run smoothly.
Last click hasn’t stopped being useful, and it can still play a role as creator marketing evolves. What has changed is everything that comes before it, because creators now shape discovery, consideration, and the path into conversion in a more deliberate way. Smart brands will stop looking at the funnel as a chain of isolated moments, and start treating it as one connected journey in which each channel has a different job to do.
