 | ||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||
| | ||||||||||||
 Hey Marketing Bestie, Today is my 1st Father's Day as a dad and for my present I've asked to sleep in until 7am. To think I used to dream of Paddock. Wouldn't have it any other way. 💙 Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by Vibe.co Yesterday, if you uploaded a list of target accounts to a CTV platform, you MAYBE reached 30% of them. Your Dashboard Doesn't Know What Actually HappenedYour dashboard says "direct traffic." That's not what happened. That's just the label your analytics tool slaps on anything it can't explain. What actually happened is your buyer asked ChatGPT a question, got a clean answer, formed an opinion about you, and showed up on your site weeks later already half decided. No click. No UTM. Your dashboard has no idea any of that happened, so it shrugs and calls it "direct." The stat that says it allA 2026 Goodfirms survey of 100 Marketing and SEO practitioners across 20 countries found that 89% of brands already appear in AI generated search results, but only 14% of marketers actively track what those results say about them. I don't need a bigger study to believe that gap. Ask any Marketing lead when they last opened ChatGPT and typed their own category into it, just to see what comes back. A lot haven't. The infrastructure to watch this channel barely exists yet, so of course almost nobody's watching it. My actual takeWe built an entire decade of Marketing infrastructure on the assumption that influence always leaves a trace. Multi touch attribution, pixel tracking, last click models, all of it rests on the idea that if something convinced a buyer, somewhere there's a UTM to prove it. That was never actually true. It just happened to be mostly true for 20 years because the way people researched purchases, search engines and clickable links, was technically trackable. That was a coincidence, not a law of Marketing. AI chat just exposed how thin that assumption always was. So I don't think the answer here is "find a better tracking tool." I don't think one exists. The dark funnel isn't a gap you patch with cleverer tagging. It's a permanent feature of how buyers research things now, and treating it like a temporary inconvenience is going to waste a lot of people's time over the next 2 years. The real problem isn't measurementThe part that actually worries me isn't the measurement problem. It's the positioning problem underneath it. The shortlist used to get built on your landing page and your retargeting sequence. Now it's getting built inside a chat window, based on whatever the model already believes about your category. You can't bid your way into that the way you bid on a keyword. You can't run a clever CTA test to fix it. The growth hacking playbook that won the last decade just doesn't transfer to a system that's synthesizing an answer instead of clicking a link. What does seem to move it is closer to old school PR than Performance Marketing. Consistency. Being described the same way across sources you don't own. Saying something specific enough that a model can quote it, instead of something safe enough that it gets skipped. That's a slower, less controllable game than the 1 most of us were trained on. It also might be the more honest 1. What I'd actually do about itIf I were running a Marketing ops team right now, here's what I'd spend my time on instead of staring at a broken dashboard: Query yourself like a buyer would. Open ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity once a month and ask the exact questions a buyer would ask about your category. Not to fix your SEO. Just to see, in plain language, what's being said about you when you're not in the room. Stop pretending every conversion needs a clean explanation. Start asking buyers directly, on the form, on the sales call: "did you use AI to research this?" It's a blunt instrument. It's also 1 of the only ones that reaches into the dark funnel at all. Stop measuring AI referred traffic by volume alone. The volume will look small for a while. That's not the signal that matters. The signal is whether the handful of people arriving from AI platforms convert better, because if they do, it means the AI already did the convincing before they ever showed up. That's worth far more than the traffic number suggests. MEME OF THE WEEK  Sponsored by Bolt.new How many landing page tests died in your dev backlog this quarter? 🎙 TUNE IN Podcast to listen to this week: Why Creative is the Still the Biggest Lever in Performance Marketing What you will learn: JUST FOR FUN Planning a trip to Brazil next year. Where should we go and what should we eat?? Your friend, | ||||||||||||
|
{beacon}
Workweek Newsletter
