The 80% Direct Problem

TODO: Opening. The day I stopped trusting the dashboard, and why a big “direct” number is a statement about your measurement, not your audience.

What “direct” actually contains

TODO: Stripped referrers, untagged campaigns, dark social, app-to-web handoffs, email clients. Why the bucket flatters everyone and informs no one.

The rebuild, in order

TODO: The sequence I follow: UTM governance, redirect audits, server-side tagging, channel taxonomy, reconciling platform numbers against one source of truth. What breaks along the way.

What changes when the data gets honest

TODO: The decisions that became possible once unattributed traffic fell. Which channels turned out to be overcredited, which were starved, and how budget moved.