How to defend the channels your attribution can't see
You have a channel you believe in. A podcast sponsorship, paid social, an influencer placement. You can feel it working, but when budget season comes, the attribution report doesn't back you up. So you lose the argument to search. Again.
Here's why that keeps happening: a large share of your conversions land in direct. And what sits in direct isn't random. It's biased toward exactly the channels that are hardest to track. The part of the report you can see isn't a small sample, it's a skewed one, and budget quietly flows toward what's measurable instead of what's working.
Direct isn't a channel. It's the reason your best channels look weak. In this session, Barbara Galiza and Timo Dechau will walk through why your direct percentage is a budget problem rather than a reporting problem, and the concrete methods available to recover that signal.
We will cover:
Why a high direct percentage skews which channels win budget, using a live example: 74% direct, in a paid enterprise attribution tool, not GA4
Which initiatives are actually at risk: the in-between digital channels that feel measurable but aren't (podcast, a lot of paid social, influencer and newsletter placements, dark social)
What direct really means and what creates it: missing UTMs, in-app browsers, redirects stripping parameters, dark social, AI assistants that don't tag their links
Five methods to recover the signal, roughly ordered by effort, each framed around what it lets you prove rather than just what it recovers
Why this can't be done inside your analytics tool, and what owning the model looks like
The Zeffy case: direct and referral from 51% to 8%, and what that unlocked
This is honest, incremental work. No method reclassifies all of your direct traffic, and any tool that promises it is hiding a black box. Results come from tuning over time, and sometimes recovering the signal shows a channel genuinely isn't performing. The goal is valid evidence, not a better-looking case for what you already believe.
Who should attend: Marketers who own paid media budget decisions: marketing leads, growth, performance marketers, and marketing ops at companies spending meaningfully on paid media and running channels beyond search. Data and analytics people supporting them will get value too, but the session is framed for the marketing side of the table.
It will be especially useful if you're about to defend a channel that's up for a cut, you're being asked to justify top-of-funnel or brand spend, direct is a large share of your attribution report, or you're about to test a channel you have no way to measure.
45 minutes of presentation, then 15 minutes of live Q&A. Bring the channel you believe is hiding in your direct numbers. Capped at 200.
About Barbara and Timo
Barbara leads marketing measurement strategy at Propel. Over the past 10 years she has helped brands like Microsoft, Mollie, and VEED.io answer the question every marketer dreads: what is actually driving results?
Timo leads data engineering at Propel. He builds the tracking systems marketing teams wish they could trust, and has done it for companies like Amplitude, Shimano, Cricut, and Audible.