I was looking at a client case again: over the last quarter, their direct traffic jumped significantly. The default reaction is always the same:
“Attribution is dead. We can’t control anything anymore.” Nothing new. But this time I paused. What if we don’t rush to that diagnosis?
In the Mostly Growth podcast (where CFOs and go-to-market folks talk money and metrics), they reference an analysis by Kira Kloss — a product marketer and the author of the Growth & Hinge newsletter. In one piece, she broke down Notion and found that roughly 94% of their traffic is branded/direct: people search “notion,” come via bookmarks, or type the URL. Only about ~6% is non-branded.
In the same podcast, they compare this to ClickUp: their share of branded/direct traffic is noticeably lower, with more dependence on performance marketing and SEO. No one searches for Notion as “best note-taking tool,” but ClickUp’s growth is much more tied to whether budget gets poured in today.
And that’s where the “what if” gets interesting. Of course, we’re not Notion…
But what if a rise in direct traffic isn’t always “tracking broke” — and sometimes it’s a sign that you’ve finally started to live in the user’s head?
Then the right question becomes: is the unit economics of this traffic better / worse / the same compared to performance channels?
The real problem, surprisingly, isn’t direct traffic going up. It’s whether the team has the language (and the measurements) to distinguish “we broke attribution” from “our brand is working.”
That’s much more interesting than automatically coloring “direct” in red in every report.
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