Case Study · Linqto · 2024 to 2025 · Head of Marketing Strategy & Operations

The 80% Direct Problem: Rebuilding Attribution at Linqto

· Logan B. Jones-Olson

The situation

Linqto is a private-market investing platform. I joined in 2024 as Head of Marketing Strategy and Operations, and the first thing I did was open the attribution report. More than 80% of conversions were labeled “direct.”

A number like that is not information. It is the absence of information wearing a channel name. “Direct” at that scale means stripped referrers, untagged campaigns, dark social, email clients eating parameters, and redirects losing data in transit. It flatters everyone, because every team can claim the mystery bucket, and it informs no one, because you cannot allocate budget to a channel called “we do not know.”

What I walked into

Channel decisions were being made by argument quality rather than evidence. If you cannot see which channel produced a customer, budget flows to whoever tells the best story in the planning meeting. Paid channels looked worse than they were, because their assisted conversions were finishing as “direct.” Untracked channels looked better than they were, for the same reason. Nobody was lying. The instrument was.

The second-order damage was worse than the reporting. With attribution broken, channel-level unit economics were guesses, which meant scaling decisions were guesses, which meant the company was either underfeeding winners or overfeeding losers and could not tell which.

The moves

  1. UTM governance first. One taxonomy, enforced. Every link that left the building carried structured parameters: channel, campaign, content, partner. Boring, unglamorous, and the single highest-return fix in the sequence, because the largest single contributor to the “direct” bucket turned out to be our own untagged links coming home.

  2. Audit every redirect and handoff. Link shorteners, email click-tracking wrappers, app-to-web transitions, and payment flows each got checked for where they dropped parameters. Every hop a link takes is a place attribution goes to die.

  3. Rebuild the channel taxonomy and reconcile against one source of truth. Platform-reported conversions never sum to the truth: every ad platform grades its own homework. We defined one internal source of truth for conversions and forced every channel number to reconcile to it, disagreements on the record and explained.

  4. Then, and only then, act on the data. Once unattributed traffic fell under 30%, channel-level CAC and payback became trustworthy for the first time, and budget moved to where the evidence pointed rather than where it had historically sat, with paid social the biggest gainer.

  5. Launch the affiliate program on top of trustworthy rails. This was the second act, and the reason the first act mattered. With tracking that could be trusted, partners could be paid accurately and the channel’s economics could be defended in any room. Built from zero, the affiliate program delivered 15% of all new customers within its first six months.

The numbers

What broke along the way

Attribution rebuilds are political before they are technical. When the mystery bucket shrinks, some channels are revealed to be smaller than their reputation, and the people who own those channels notice. The data conversations were easy. The “your channel is not what the old report said it was” conversations required more care.

The rebuild also broke some of its own history. Once the taxonomy changed, year-over-year channel comparisons became apples to oranges, and we had to run old and new views side by side for a period rather than pretending the past had been measured the way the present now was.

And perfection was never on the table. Under 30% unattributed is honest; zero is fiction. Dark social exists. Some conversions will always arrive with no traceable story, and an attribution system that claims otherwise is lying with more precision.

What I would tell you if you are facing this

Do not start with software. Most companies facing an 80% direct problem go shopping for an attribution vendor, and most of the fix is not purchasable: it is tagging discipline, redirect hygiene, one agreed source of truth, and the willingness to let the new numbers embarrass the old ones.

Sequence matters. Lifecycle segmentation and journey mapping drove double-digit gains in engagement and conversion here, but only because the measurement rails were rebuilt first. The same programs run on top of broken attribution would have produced unverifiable wins.

And build something on the new rails quickly. The affiliate program was the proof that the measurement work was worth it: a channel that could not have been trusted, paid, or defended a year earlier became 15% of new customers in six months. Clean data is not the win. What you build on it is.

More of the record: all case studies · the writing · get in touch