Burn the Dashboard
Why the death of tracking might be the best thing to happen to marketing in a decade.
Mental Model 🧠
The Attribution Death Spiral
The more you obsess over tracking, the less you understand what's actually driving growth.
Quick Insights
🔮 Marketing's $12M blind spot
Everyone keeps asking, “Did our ads work?” This CRO asked, “What would’ve happened if we’d done nothing?” Turns out he was right.
🔍 Attribution is lying to you
Your CRM gives credit to paid search. But the deal came from Slack DMs, a podcast, and a coffee chat. Good luck tracking that.
🩸 The day Meta went blind
Custom audiences disappeared. Attribution windows collapsed from 28 days to 7. Dashboards didn’t break. They just stopped showing you anything useful.
Marketers talk about attribution like it’s a science. But it’s closer to astrology.
I’ve run $20M+ in performance marketing campaigns where every click had to earn its keep. And I’ve run brand campaigns where you’re flying blind and hoping for signs.
The thing is, the stuff I couldn’t measure often worked the best.
But most marketers still worship dashboards. We’ve built million-dollar strategies off metrics that wouldn’t pass a school science project.
Look, dashboards don’t lie. They just leave out nearly everything that matters.
The Fairytale 🧚
“Track every click and you’ll know what works.”
“If it’s not in the data, it didn’t happen.”
“Vanity metrics are better than nothing.”
Fiction.
The Reality ✅
77.5% of sharing is invisible (Dark Social data)
93% of attribution died with iOS 14.5 (Dashboard data)
Most metrics don't drive revenue anyway (Vanity metrics data)
You’re not seeing the full picture anymore. And that might be the best thing that’s happened to marketing in a decade.
Because once obsessive attribution dies, you have to look elsewhere.
Do people remember you?
Are they talking about you?
Do they come back without needing a discount code?
That’s marketing.
Not math.
Attribution is BS but you still need it
I believe most attribution is fiction.
But pretending you don’t need it? That’s just stupid.
Try walking into a boardroom or CFO with no data, just vibes. Let me know how that goes.
You need numbers. The mistake is treating those numbers as truth.
If you starve your brand just because it’s hard to measure, you’re killing demand.
Take Ryanair. Their TikTok content is chaotic, unfiltered, and impossible to tie directly to bookings. But it works. They estimate earned media value and compare it to paid spend. CFOs get that.
Attribution’s a hunch. Treat it like one.
👉 Read my post The Underworld of Dark Social
7 growth strategies that don’t rely on attribution
1. The Server-Side Tracking Switch
Browser-based pixels are toast. Facebook Pixel? Hanging on by a thread.
Server-side tracking is the only attribution method that maintains accuracy while meeting privacy requirements.
Move your pixel tracking to your servers, not the browser.
Use tools like Segment to collect first-party data server-side.
2. First-Party Data > Everything
If you don’t own the relationship, you don’t own the result.
Attribution models that rely on third-party data are dead.
What works now:
Email capture with progressive profiling
Customer accounts with behavioral tracking
Direct website visits through branded searches
SMS opt-ins for immediate communication
3. Test for Lift, Not Clicks
Incrementality tests are the only honest measurement system left.
Run one channel for 2 weeks
Pause it for 2 weeks
Measure the delta
That’s your real impact
4. The Cohort-Based Growth System
Referred customers have 16% higher lifetime value than non-referred ones.
Focus on:
Monthly cohort retention rates
Revenue per cohort over time
Organic vs. paid cohort performance
Cross-cohort referral patterns
5. Direct Response Renaissance
Newsletters with sharp CTAs
SMS for urgency
Direct mail still works in B2B. Yes, really.
6. Build Communities You Own
Private Slack/Discord groups
Substack or Circle communities
Customer advisory boards that feed loyalty and product insights
7. Metrics That Still Matter
Track metrics that don't need perfect attribution:
Direct website traffic growth
Email open and click rates
Customer lifetime value by acquisition source
Net Promoter Score by channel
Monthly recurring revenue by cohort
👉 Read my post on Marketing Metrics That Don’t Suck
Why incrementality > attribution
Attribution tells you what happened. Incrementality tells you whether it mattered.
Most dashboards show clicks. They don’t show whether those clicks changed anything. That’s why incrementality testing works.
Run a proper test vs control. If the test group buys more, congrats you’ve got lift. If they don’t? You just paid to make noise.
Incrementality testing works without cookies, pixels, or creepy tracking. It’s private. Reliable. And far less delusional.
👉 Read my post on The One Competitive Advantage AI Can’t Copy
North star reality check for modern marketing teams
Tracking is worse. Budgets are tighter. And every founder secretly knows half their attribution report is a well-designed lie.
I still use dashboards. Of course I do. But the problem isn’t using them, it’s obsessing over them. When you treat dashboards like gospel, you stop seeing the stuff that actually drives growth.
👉 Read my post on Why Trust, Not Funnels, Closes Enterprise Deals
If you need a pixel to prove you did your job, you probably didn’t.
This week's intel 📚
Some interesting Substacks I read this week
Shopify Adds Stablecoins | Here’s the Fintech Playbook by
It blows my mind that card networks drain $180B annually from merchants. This is a great read if you are interested in fintech.What people are vibe coding by
Check out 50+ useful/fun/clever examples of what non-technical people are building. You might get some ideas.What Good Is a College Degree When AI Knows Everything? by
Knowledge is worthless on its own. This post still offers some hope.
Got something I should read? Hit reply, I actually read every suggestion.
Until next week, keep building. No fairytales required.
Martin, Chief Ranter at Uncharted
P.S. this week’s track is Enjoy The Silence by Depeche mode
🙌🙌🙌
I feel like we wrote the same post this week, but in very different ways. Exciting to see!