TLDR Tech / Marketing
Direct and organic should not be channels in your attribution reporting
Most attribution reports hide tracking gaps inside direct and organic traffic, which leads marketers to overcredit channels that did not drive discovery. Branded organic search often makes up 70%+ of SEO conversions, so teams should separate recall from acquisition and use tools like Search Console to identify inflated performance. Combine survey data, vanity URLs, landing page rules, and email-based identity stitching to recover attribution signals from channels where UTMs fail or disappear. Exclude noisy touchpoints like brand search and existing user revisits so you can make cleaner budget decisions. A practical benchmark is to investigate attribution quality when direct and referral exceed 10% of conversions or when “other” responses in surveys rise above 10% to 15%.
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