Marketing attribution
Stop trusting platform analytics. See which campaign actually earned a conversion.
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You posted to LinkedIn on Tuesday. You ran a Reddit thread on Wednesday. You did a Show HN on Thursday. On Friday, twenty-three people signed up. Which post earned which signup?
If you can’t answer that with confidence, the rest of your week is theater. Doubling down on the wrong thing is how you burn another month, and the social platforms whose own analytics you’re trusting have no incentive to tell you their numbers are vanity.
Open Goals, click into a specific goal, and read three sections in order:
- Top campaigns by conversions (lifetime). If you’ve been running campaigns through Campaigns, this is your source of truth. Every session attributed to a campaign that completed this goal is counted here.
- Top referrers (last 30 days). Where the traffic came from before it converted. “linkedin.com” and “news.ycombinator.com” are the obvious ones. “Direct” is the bucket for everyone who landed without a referrer header (private browsers, mobile apps, copy-pasted links).
- Top landing pages (last 30 days). The first page the visitor saw in the session that ended in conversion. Useful when you have multiple landing pages targeting different audiences.
If “Top campaigns” is empty, the data isn’t missing. The traffic is. Untagged traffic is anonymous traffic, and anonymous traffic doesn’t help your future self decide what to do more of. Wrap the workflow that drives the traffic in a campaign so the conversion signal makes it back to you.
The platforms tell you about impressions. Goals tell you about signups. Always read the second one first.