Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
You know what drives me crazy? When a client comes to me bragging about their "8.5 Facebook ROAS" while their organic traffic just tripled. I've been there - celebrating victories that weren't actually victories, making budget decisions based on data that was fundamentally broken.
The harsh reality? Most businesses are optimizing their marketing spend based on attribution lies. Facebook takes credit for organic wins. Google Ads claims conversions that happened three touchpoints later. Meanwhile, your best-performing channels get zero recognition because they can't track their own success.
After working with dozens of SaaS startups and e-commerce stores, I've learned that attribution is broken by design - and more importantly, how to build marketing strategies that work despite this reality.
Here's what you'll discover:
Why single-channel attribution is killing your marketing ROI
The dark funnel phenomenon that's invisible to your analytics
How to build marketing strategies that embrace attribution chaos
A framework for making budget decisions without perfect data
Real tactics for improving channel performance regardless of tracking
Industry Reality
What every marketer thinks they know about attribution
Walk into any marketing team meeting and you'll hear the same conversations. "Our Facebook campaigns are crushing it - we're seeing 4x ROAS!" "Google Ads is our winner, let's double the budget." "SEO isn't working, we're getting zero conversions from organic."
The industry has built an entire ecosystem around the myth of perfect attribution. Marketing platforms pump out dashboards filled with last-click attribution data. Agencies sell services based on single-channel ROI reports. Business owners make million-dollar budget decisions based on which platform claims credit for the most conversions.
Here's what conventional wisdom tells you to do:
Trust your platform data - Facebook says 8.5 ROAS? That's your number
Optimize for last-click conversions - whoever gets the final touch wins the budget
Kill underperforming channels - if it doesn't show direct ROI, cut it
Scale what's "working" - double down on high-attribution channels
Use UTM parameters religiously - more tracking equals better data
This approach exists because it's simple. It gives marketers clean reports to show stakeholders. It creates clear winners and losers. It makes complex customer journeys feel manageable.
But here's where this falls apart: attribution platforms are designed to sell you their own success. Facebook's attribution model is optimized to prove Facebook works. Google's reporting is designed to justify Google's ad spend. They're not neutral data sources - they're sales tools.
The real customer journey looks nothing like your attribution reports suggest. A typical customer might Google your problem, see your Facebook ad three times, read your blog post, subscribe to your newsletter, watch a YouTube video, see a retargeting ad, and finally convert through direct traffic. But in your analytics? That's a "direct conversion" with zero attribution to the seven touchpoints that actually drove the sale.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
I learned this lesson the hard way while working with an e-commerce client who was obsessed with Facebook attribution data. They came to me celebrating their success - Facebook was reporting 2.5 ROAS, and they were convinced they'd cracked the code on paid advertising.
The reality was different. Their margins were tight, their customer acquisition costs were climbing, and despite the "success" Facebook was claiming, their overall revenue growth had plateaued. Something wasn't adding up.
That's when I convinced them to try something radical: we spent three months building a complete SEO overhaul while keeping their Facebook ads running. Complete website restructuring, content strategy, technical optimization - the works. It was a significant investment in a channel that their analytics said was contributing almost nothing.
Within a month of implementing the SEO strategy, something interesting happened. Facebook's reported ROAS jumped from 2.5 to 8-9. Their "ad performance" had magically improved overnight.
But here's the kicker - we hadn't changed anything about their Facebook campaigns. Not the creative, not the targeting, not the budget. The only difference was that SEO was now driving significant organic traffic and conversions.
What was happening? Facebook's attribution model was claiming credit for organic wins. People were discovering the brand through Google search, researching the products through organic content, but because they'd been cookied by a Facebook ad weeks earlier, Facebook took credit when they finally converted.
This was my introduction to what I now call the "dark funnel" - the invisible customer journey that happens between your trackable touchpoints. It's the Google searches, the word-of-mouth recommendations, the email forwards, the social media shares that don't trigger your UTM parameters but absolutely influence purchase decisions.
The client's customer journey actually looked like this: Google search → organic content consumption → Facebook ad exposure (cookie placed) → more research → email nurture sequence → multiple touchpoints → conversion. But in Facebook's reporting, that entire complex journey got attributed to a single Facebook ad impression.
This experience completely changed how I approach channel attribution and marketing strategy.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once I understood that attribution was broken by design, I needed to develop a different approach. Instead of trying to fix tracking (impossible) or trusting platform data (misleading), I focused on building what I call "coverage strategy" - maximizing your brand's visibility across every possible touchpoint where your customers might discover you.
Here's the framework I developed through working with that e-commerce client and dozens of others since:
Step 1: Accept Attribution Chaos
Stop trying to track the untrackable. Instead of perfect attribution, focus on overall business metrics: total revenue, customer lifetime value, blended CAC across all channels. If your overall metrics are improving while you're investing in multiple channels, you're on the right track.
Step 2: Map the Dark Funnel
Survey your customers about their actual discovery process. We started asking every new customer: "How did you first hear about us? What made you decide to buy? What other research did you do?" The answers rarely matched our analytics data.
What we discovered: customers were experiencing 8-12 touchpoints across multiple channels before converting. They'd see a Facebook ad, Google our problem, read our blog content, join our email list, see retargeting ads, and finally convert through "direct" traffic. But our analytics only captured 2-3 of those touchpoints.
Step 3: Build Channel Synergy
Instead of optimizing channels in isolation, I started building strategies where channels amplify each other. SEO content feeds email marketing. Facebook ads drive brand searches. Email subscribers become social media advocates. Each channel makes the others more effective.
For the e-commerce client, this meant:
Creating SEO content that addressed the same problems as their Facebook ads
Building email sequences that nurtured people who clicked ads but didn't convert
Using retargeting to re-engage people who found them organically
Optimizing for brand searches, not just product searches
Step 4: Focus on Leading Indicators
Since conversion attribution is broken, I track leading indicators that predict success: brand search volume, direct traffic growth, email subscriber growth, social media mentions, customer survey responses. These metrics tell you if your coverage strategy is working.
Step 5: Test Channel Interactions
Instead of A/B testing within channels, test combinations of channels. What happens to Facebook performance when you pause SEO content creation? How does email open rate change when you increase brand awareness advertising? These interaction effects are where the real insights live.
The key insight: modern marketing isn't about finding the perfect channel - it's about building a system where multiple channels work together to guide customers through an increasingly complex discovery process.
This approach requires giving up control and embracing uncertainty. You can't perfectly measure everything, but you can build marketing systems that work despite imperfect measurement.
Coverage Strategy
Build presence across every possible customer touchpoint rather than optimizing single channels in isolation
Attribution Reality
Most customer journeys involve 8-12 touchpoints across multiple channels before conversion occurs
Dark Funnel Mapping
Survey customers about their actual discovery process - it rarely matches your analytics data
Interaction Testing
Test combinations of channels rather than individual channel performance to understand synergistic effects
The results spoke for themselves, even though the attribution data couldn't capture the full picture. Over the three-month implementation period, the e-commerce client saw:
Overall business metrics improved dramatically: total monthly revenue increased by 67% while blended customer acquisition cost actually decreased by 23%. More importantly, the revenue growth became more predictable and sustainable.
Direct traffic - which I now recognize as a proxy for brand strength - grew by 156%. Brand search volume increased by 89%. Email subscriber growth rate doubled, and email-driven revenue increased by 134%.
Here's what was fascinating: Facebook's reported ROAS stabilized at around 6.5x - still impressive, but more importantly, it became less volatile. When your brand has multi-channel coverage, individual channel performance becomes more stable because you're not dependent on any single platform's algorithm changes.
Customer lifetime value increased by 31%, which suggests that customers who discovered the brand through multiple touchpoints were higher quality and more loyal than single-channel acquisitions.
The timeline taught me something important: month one showed minimal change, month two showed promising signals in leading indicators, and month three was when the compounding effects really kicked in. This isn't a quick-fix strategy - it's about building long-term marketing infrastructure.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experience taught me several hard lessons about modern marketing reality:
Attribution is a tool, not the truth. Use platform data to understand trends and optimize within channels, but never let it drive strategic budget decisions across channels.
The dark funnel is your competitive advantage. Most businesses only compete in trackable channels. By building strong coverage in the untrackable spaces - word of mouth, brand searches, direct traffic, social shares - you're competing where your competitors aren't measuring.
Leading indicators predict better than lagging indicators. Brand search volume, direct traffic trends, and customer survey responses tell you more about future performance than last month's conversion data.
Channel synergy beats channel optimization. A mediocre multi-channel strategy outperforms a perfect single-channel strategy because modern customers expect to find you everywhere.
Embrace the unknown. The businesses that win in the attribution-chaos era are those that can make decisions with incomplete data and build systems that work despite imperfect measurement.
Test interactions, not just channels. The most valuable insights come from understanding how your channels affect each other, not how they perform in isolation.
When this works best: Complex customer journeys, higher consideration purchases, B2B sales, premium products. When it doesn't: Simple impulse purchases, single-session conversion flows, very tight attribution tracking requirements.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups dealing with attribution challenges:
Focus on trial-to-paid conversion rates across all channels
Track product usage patterns by acquisition source
Build content that supports your ads and vice versa
Use customer interviews to understand true discovery paths
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores managing multi-channel attribution:
Monitor brand search volume and direct traffic growth
Build email sequences that connect paid and organic touchpoints
Focus on customer lifetime value over first-purchase attribution
Create content that amplifies your paid advertising themes