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Warren Buffet may eat a banana right before he buys a yacht, but luxury yacht builders would be making some pretty bad conclusions if they tried to connect the two events.  A session at SES San Jose examined whether or not the practice of last click attribution (which often points to paid search) fails in a similar manner.

Coverage of the SES San Jose conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.

Gary Milner, who's the global marketing director of Lenovo's Interactive and Teleweb Marketing division, was the first presenter to speak.  He brought up the old John Wanamaker quote about wasted advertising money, and emphasized that businesses need to start working towards attribution models now in order to make better marketing decisions in the future.

Robin Smith, the global search marketing manager at Life Technologies, then stepped up to introduce a couple of points about the complexity of doing so.  After doing some investigating, she found that her company had missed roughly 80 percent of the touch points leading to conversions.

Next, Mark Grote, who's a senior search manager at Microsoft, issued some statements about his company's stance on last click attribution.  He claimed that search overdelivers and is over-credited in terms of campaign performance.  SEO ties more to the awareness and consideration phase of a purchase than to sales, according to Grote.

Finally, Adam Goldberg, ClearSaleing's chief innovation officer, wrapped up the session's formal presentations.  He made the point that banners can be extremely useful in influencing the types of searches that are done.  Otherwise, Goldberg stated that the last click model is not as effective as the attribution model, and that you can't do attribution just by guessing.