What we can see, and what we choose not to guess

The graphic at the top of our homepage has one node drawn in a dashed outline and labelled "unknown." It is not a placeholder. It is a touch that happened and did not resolve, kept in the picture on purpose. This post is the longer version of that node: what we can see at each step, and where we stop.

The ladder

Think of the signals a campaign produces as rungs on a ladder. Each rung is a different kind of evidence, and the higher you climb, the less of it there is.

A send. The email left. We know who it was addressed to, because the list is in the workspace and the send is recorded against the campaign. This is the firmest rung there is.

An open. The email was opened, or at least a mail client fetched it. Opens are recorded against the send, and the send carried campaign context, so an open ties back to the message. Mail clients vary in what they report, so an open is a good signal and not a certain one.

A tracked visit. Someone clicked a link that carried campaign context and arrived on a page. The click ties to the email; the visit ties to the click; supported website activity adds the pages and vehicles the visitor went on to view. This is where the story becomes a story: a path from the campaign to the site, read as one visit.

A return. The visitor came back later. When the signals allow it, the return is tied to the earlier visit, and the story gains a second chapter. When they do not, the return is recorded as a visit in its own right and the earlier chapter stays where it was.

Aggregate paid engagement. A search or social placement reports how many people it reached and how many came through. This rung does not name anyone. It is a count against the placement, set beside the email and the page in the same campaign, and it is read as a count.

Which rungs read as a story

The first four rungs can join into one story per visit: this send, opened, clicked through, returned. That is what the homepage means by "read as one story," and it is what the attribution report shows when the signals line up.

The word that matters is can. A tracked visit does not always identify a person. Two visits from the same person can arrive without anything to connect them. A return can look like a first visit. How much resolves depends on the signals each visit carries, and those vary from one visitor to the next and from one device to the next.

Which rungs report as counts

The paid rung reports as counts by nature, and we keep it that way in the report. There is a second kind of count, too: the touches that did not resolve. A visit that arrived without campaign context, a return we could not connect to an earlier visit, a click from a placement that landed and left. These are not lost. They are recorded and shown as what they are, so the volume is honest even where the story is incomplete.

Why we do not fill the gaps