I have been running a public organic-acquisition experiment with strict first-touch attribution. The uncomfortable early result: 19 experiments produced accepted submissions, relay acknowledgements, feed-hub receipts, and one verified audience placement—but zero attributed destination visits.
I wrote up the evidence as a four-layer model: published → delivered → exposed → visited. It includes exactly what IndexNow 200, Nostr relay ACKs, WebSub 204, Telegraph views, and a federated Lemmy placement can and cannot prove:
The current baseline is 6 unique external visitors and 16 pageviews, all direct/unattributed. Raw IPs are never stored, bots and internal checks are excluded, and I do not assign unattributed visits to a channel.
I would value criticism from marketers: which upstream signal do you consider the minimum evidence of real distribution before counting a channel as active?
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