I traced a batch of "direct traffic" leads. They all came from a podcast the dashboard never credited.

A client was convinced their best leads were "direct" traffic. People typing the URL in cold. I never believed it, because nobody memorizes a plumbing company web address.

So this week I actually traced the path on a handful of them. Every one had heard the owner on a local podcast, sat on it for a few days, then looked the company up by name. The podcast did the work. The analytics handed all the credit to "direct" and made the real driver invisible.

This is the problem I keep circling in what I am building. Service business owners do not need more charts. They need the charts to stop lying about what is actually working. When the last click takes all the credit, you end up cutting the top-of-funnel stuff that quietly fills the pipeline.

I am still in the part of this where I would rather talk to people than write a feature list. So I have been asking owners one question: when you look at your numbers, can you tell which channel actually started the relationship, or only which one closed it?

Almost everyone says only the close. That gap is the whole reason I am building.

For the builders here: how do you handle multi-touch attribution for small clients without a six-figure analytics stack? Curious what actually works in practice, not in theory.