Southeast Asian consumers are turning to generative AI to discover products, with one in four (24%) now using it as part of their shopping journey. That adds another layer to a journey that may already span creators, social commerce, retail media and marketplaces before a purchase is made.

A consumer might discover a product through an AI assistant, sees it again in a creator's video, compares it on a marketplace, then buys it through an app days later. By the time the transaction happens, several channels may have already shaped the decision.

For marketers, the challenge is not simply keeping up with another discovery channel. It is understanding how these interactions work together, and whether the customers they bring in actually create value. Traditional attribution wasn't built to answer that.

Last-click attribution tells marketers where a conversion happened but not necessarily what shaped the decision to buy. In today's consumer shopping journey, the app purchase is easy to measure. The AI recommendation, the creator review and the price comparison that built the intent to buy aren't.

The problem isn't that the last click is irrelevant. It's that treating it as the whole story can overvalue the channel closest to conversion while undervaluing  the ones that built the demand in the first place.

The stakes are higher in a region where mobile commerce keeps expanding. Singapore's eCommerce app installs grew 67% year on year in the first half of 2026, which means more installs mean more acquisition opportunities, and more pressure to understand what happens to those users after they download.

Source link