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independence4 unconnected · 2 more authors in those circles
standing

contested · 7 claims against 2

applies to

b2b, no audience needed

this one failed

confidence

high

evidence

10 claims · 8 articles · 4 receipts

window

2010-06-14 → 2025-07-24

4 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Rip out the machinery you cannot read anyway

Most of the automation, attribution and retargeting stack around a small product is overhead, and the reports it produces are wrong in ways you cannot see: whole categories of sharing arrive labelled direct, and the mentions that actually move buyers never appear at all. Slicing the data harder makes it worse, since more cuts produce more impressive correlations that mean nothing.

What both sides agree on

  • Swap return on investment for value on investment, and pick the handful of lagging signals that fit your channels.

Where this splits

Attribution is called mostly unnecessary overhead that misreports the channels that matter, and separately called the thing you must build before scaling marketing, with per-page revenue wired to the payment processor overturning what its owner assumed.

  1. side 01 · 7 claims

    Rip out attribution, it misreads the channels anyway

    Amanda Natividad · Greg Kogan · Jason Cohen · Justin Jackson · Rand Fishkin

    1. 1Strip out the marketing automation, attribution config, funnel tooling and retargeting; the single question worth answering is which activities produced actual revenue.
    2. 2Cut the marketing stack rather than building it out; automation, attribution, funnel configuration and retargeting are mostly avoidable overhead for a small SaaS.
    3. 3Stop grading channels on attribution, because the mentions that move buyers are the ones your tools will never see.
    4. 4Stop treating your analytics referrer report as the truth, because whole categories of sharing arrive labelled as direct.
    5. 5Stop mining your analytics for interesting combinations: the more ways you slice the data, the more impressive correlations you will find that mean nothing.

  2. side 02 · 2 claims

    Build attribution before you scale any marketing spend

    Cory Zue · Justin Jackson

    1. 1Build sales attribution before you scale up marketing, because without it you cannot tell which of your channels is actually producing revenue.
    2. 2Wire your website analytics to your payment processor so you can see how many dollars each individual page has actually collected.

What it returned

  • 16

    After 16 years marketing SaaS the author concluded roughly 90% of that machinery is unnecessary, partly because tools like Google Analytics make you assign an estimated value to each conversion.

  • 13

    After 13 years marketing SaaS products, Justin concluded that around 90% of that machinery is unnecessary.

  • 99

    Rand Fishkin lists podcast mentions, about 99 percent of PR, and most YouTube and short-video mentions as untrackable, and warns that attribution therefore overweights paid and branded search while missing nearly everything else.

  • Amanda Natividad lists Slack, Discord, Mastodon and WhatsApp as sources whose links show up with no referral information at all.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in other

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.