Your best channel just vanished from your reports

Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Monday - and that means it’s time for your CRM Dispatch - an issue where we dig into your CRM. ✨

Starting this week, the Dispatch is widening the lens a little - and here’s why.

The CRM is the heart of the business, and every channel feeds it, which means when something shifts out in the market, we see the symptom land in the CRM long before anyone diagnoses the actual problem.

A mystery spike in "direct traffic" leads is a symptom, and the problem lives upstream, so from now on, we are going to follow it there.

So, what was happening in the marketing industry last week? Well, the “Direct Traffic” surge has people frustrated.

Let’s dive in.

Your CRM can’t read every single signal across your entire marketing efforts, across every platform or how people interact on third-party platforms.

Here’s the thing - we are people, and we are complicated. Historically, marketing funnels are built as a journey from ad > landing page > form-fill > sales follow-up.

But we don’t always work like that. When someone reads your founder's LinkedIn post, thinks about it for a week, then types your URL into their browser, the CRM records "direct" and the post that did the selling gets zero credit.

Your source field is only as honest as the journey it can see.

It’s no secret that AI has changed things in marketing. It has also influenced how people interpret content and how trust is built online.

Employee and founder posts generate up to 14x the engagement of company pages, while company page reach has dropped roughly 60% since 2024, and around 70% of the B2B buying journey now happens before anyone fills out a form.

Generic company pages no longer carry the trust - there’s a lack of a human touch there. Founder posts? Major boost. Personal stories and post? Major boost.

That means that the trust-driven content doing the heavy lifting shows up in your analytics as "direct" or nothing at all. So when it’s time to plan for marketing, it’s tough to decipher where to put the budget.

Keep in mind that Direct Traffic is also a bucket for anyone who has privacy and blockers on their browsers.

There’s only so much you can do with tracking. There’s a reason why it’s becoming tougher to track and understanding what is happening online and how leads are sourced and make their way into your CRM.

Direct Traffic is a culprit for many, and you cannot fix this with better tracking, because the journey happens in feeds, DMs and Slack threads your pixels will never enter.

What you can do is ask.

Old skool methods.

Add an open-text "How did you hear about us?" field to your highest-converting forms, make it a first-class property in the CRM rather than letting the answers die inside your form tool, then report self-reported attribution beside your last-touch data every month.

While I’m a huge fan of structured fields, I think it’s important to let the prospect share their own journey. Use it as qualitative research, not structured “put you in a bucket” reporting.

Maria runs a bakery in Portland. Last Tuesday, between the morning rush and afternoon prep, she opened Readdy.ai, typed two sentences about her shop, and had a website live before her espresso went cold.

Online ordering. Hours. Photos of the croissants. A booking form for custom cakes. Indexed on Google by Wednesday.

She didn't call a developer. She didn't buy a template. She didn't watch a YouTube tutorial.

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We’ve been working hard on getting the final version of the Q2 Signals Report ready for next week. Because you are a subscriber, you’ll get it free!

TL;DR

The market moved to people-led, trust-driven content, but your reporting is only capturing part of the story. And you see your Direct Traffic increasing without understanding why. You are letting your dashboard argue against your best channel. Fix the field before the next budget cycle fixes it for you, so you can grow smarter with your biggest chance of ROI.