Insights
Attribution, for businesses that close offline.
What we have learned reconciling closed sales against lead sources — the methods, the failure modes, and the numbers that survive a finance review.
The thread did the selling
Reddit is where people go to find out whether a product is any good, and the answer comes from strangers rather than from you. Buying ads next to that conversation works. Getting credit for it does not, and the reasons are structural — a 28-day ceiling, a pseudonymous audience, and a recommendation no pixel ever sees.
The stand cost £28,000 and the deal closed in March
Trade shows and webinars produce the best-qualified leads most companies get and the worst measurement. The badge scan is not the problem: the gap between the scan and the invoice is. Here is how to price an event by the revenue it closed, months after everybody stopped talking about it.
The lead you bought was also sold to three other companies
Angi, Thumbtack and the other home-service marketplaces charge for an introduction, not a job, and the introduction is often shared. That makes cost per lead the least useful number they report. Here is how to price a marketplace by the paid work it actually produced, and what to do with the answer.
You are paying commission on sales that were already yours
Affiliate and partner programs pay on the last click before a sale, which rewards whoever stands closest to the till rather than whoever found the customer. The cookie was always a weak witness. Here is how to check a partner's claims against your own closed sales, and what to pay for instead.
The free listing that takes most of your calls and reports none of your sales
For a local business the Google Business Profile is often the busiest front door it has: the call button, the directions, the website link. It reports taps, not customers, and since July 2024 it no longer keeps even a list of who rang. How to find out what the listing is actually worth.
The channel with no invoice, no click ID and half its keywords hidden
Organic search is often the largest source of customers a business has and the one it measures worst. There is no spend to divide by, no click identifier to follow, and Google withholds close to half the queries. Here is what can honestly be known about what it earns, and how to find out.
Your call tracking knows which ad rang the phone. It does not know which call paid.
Call tracking answers one question well: which campaign produced the ring. It has no view of what happened after the call ended, which is where the money is decided. This is what the gap costs, and how to close it without replacing the call tracker you already have.
The one channel where you already know who saw the ad
Direct mail is called the unmeasurable channel, and it is the only one that hands you a list of every person it reached. The problem was never measurement. It is that the two usual ways of measuring it are wrong in opposite directions.
Now you can see where the money went, and still not what it bought
Performance Max spent three years as the campaign that would not say where your budget had gone. In 2026 Google opened the channel report and answered that. It is a real improvement, and it answers a question your finance director was not asking.
The most expensive click you buy, and the nine months before it pays
LinkedIn is the one paid channel where the person who clicked is very probably the person you wanted. It is also the channel whose reporting is least able to tell you whether that person ever bought — because the sale happens months later, through a committee, in a system LinkedIn cannot see.
Email takes the credit for customers you already had
Email platforms report attributed revenue, and the number is usually enormous. It is also the number most likely to be counting sales that were going to happen anyway — because email is the one channel whose audience is a list of people who have already bought from you.
Some of those conversions never happened
A growing share of the conversions in your ad platform reports were not observed. They were estimated by a model, from the behavior of other people, and reported in the same column as the real ones. That is a defensible thing for a platform to do and an indefensible thing for you not to know.
Stop guessing which ads pay off.
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