I Replaced $2,000 Tools for Free (Steal It)

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Attribution used to be the thing everyone bragged about on dashboards. Now, it feels more like a magic trick nobody can quite pull off.

My team and I have spent the past year in the weeds with brands. Ecomm, SaaS, app launches, everybody, trying to answer one deceptively simple question: Where is the revenue actually coming from?

The answer? It’s never been murkier. But it’s also never been more important.

This week, we’re going to break down:

• Why attribution has gotten so hard, practically overnight

• The 5 signals that still matter (even as old tracking falls apart)

• And a free, open-source tool I made that replaces thousand dollar social listening subscriptions (skip to the end to get it)

Attribution Is Officially On Hard Mode

If you’ve felt like tracking your marketing is getting harder every quarter, you’re not crazy. We saw it with our own agency Emerald Digital and clients, blow-by-blow:

Outbound Sales (2023):
Remember when open rates were the go-to metric? Kiss those days goodbye.

• Apple Mail Privacy Protection rolled in, inflating open rates—the pixels get triggered even when nobody actually opens your email.

• Gmail and Yahoo weren’t far behind, tightening privacy and spam filters, killing tracking everywhere.

• Click rates? Hit or miss. More links flagged, more breakage.

• Replies? Sometimes MIA, sometimes delayed.

• Dashboards? Toast.

So we went old-school:

• Call logs

• Rep notes

• On every intro call: “How’d you hear about us?”

Not glamorous, but for the first time in a while, we started getting back to a version of the truth the tools couldn’t see

DTC & App Launches:
Attribution here? A moving target.

• One of our DTC clients: big mysterious surge in direct traffic.

• Analytics? 🤷 “???”

• But sales? 📈 Up 40% overnight.

Turns out the product had gone mini-viral in Slack and Skool groups, totally off the radar. No referrer data, just a swarm of high-intent buyers typing the brand into Google. That’s today’s reality: analytics can’t tell you WHY, they just show you the wake after the splash.

And the “halo effect”?
Performance campaigns often lift every channel: Salesforce, in-store, Amazon… You’ll feel the bump, but your dashboard will likely miss it.

Private Communities:
If Skool isn’t on your radar yet, it should be.
Add Discord, Slack, iMessage, Circle, WhatsApp, the velvet-rope communities where brand buzz happens (untrackable, untraceable).
No pixels. No scripts. No “growth hack” to sneak inside.

What works instead?
Track the ripple effects:

• Demo requests from “nowhere”

• Branded search spikes

• Customer feedback: “My buddies recommended you on Slack/private group”

• Simple surveys: “Who pointed you here?”

This is “Dark Social”, referrals and conversions that happen where no analytics tool will ever reach. The best you can do? Build automations to prompt for this data, and make sure your team is primed to log every whisper when it lands.

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What Actually Shows Signal Now

Right now, this is the playbook:

1. Brand Echo Velocity

How fast is your brand name getting searched, screenshot, or mentioned in places you can’t track?

• We check for direct traffic bumps, branded keyword spikes, and yes old-fashioned “where did you hear about us?” replies (but take this data with a grain of salt).

• Recently, a SaaS founder we advise watched his “worst performing” campaign (by pixel data) set off a branded search chain reaction. Two weeks later: influx of sign ups. The Meta dashboard didn’t catch it, but the branded search volume did.

2. Ghost Referrals

You see traffic jumps, but zero referral data. We log manual entries, spikes in “/” landings, and keep a spreadsheet of every “I just Googled you” or “found your site through a friend.”

3. Community Whisper Networks

The new pipeline often starts in a Slack group or podcast mention you’ll never see unless you ask.

4. AI Answer Engine Visibility

• Lately, we’ve had multiple B2B signups open with: “ChatGPT recommended you.”

• It’s a whole new referral channel, and right now it’s almost untracked except for what customers tell you directly.

“ChatGPT recommended you” it’s the new word-of-mouth channel, and it’s basically opaque unless you’re listening for it. We’re seeing this more and more with B2B signups (AI intent is 4x higher). And there’s a crop of tools like Promptwatch.com and X-Funnel for this.

5. Dark Social Momentum

The more “screenshot-worthy” your content, the more likely it travels by group chat, Discord, or WhatsApp.

For a client last month, we noticed a spike in demo requests after a LinkedIn carousel was screenshotted into several founder groups, none of which ever showed up as a referral.

How Do You Actually Track This?

Attribution is getting harder by the day, but the solutions out there? They’re either wildly expensive, locked behind clunky enterprise contracts, or built for the old world of cookie-cutter funnels.

So I did what I always do when something's broken: I built my own.

It’s a free, open-source giveaway, built over a this past weekend because I was tired of $2k/month tools missing the signal. Is it the end-all? No. But it’s surprisingly badass for a weekend project, and it replaces thousands in overpriced platforms. Take it, fork it, tweak it, make it yours.

What I Built This Weekend

• Real-Time Echo Tracking: Connects to your Google Search Console and Analytics APIs to spot branded search spikes, direct traffic bumps, and mention patterns you’d never see in the default dashboards.

• AI-Powered Mention Scraping: Uses ScraperCreators and Exa Search APIs to find conversations about your brand on the web, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit (with more integrations planned). Gemini Flash (through OpenRouter) handles sentiment.

• Community Signal Logging: Built-in prompts and simple forms so you (or your team) can quickly log DMs, screenshots, "where did you hear about us" responses, and private share anecdotes, exactly the signals traditional tools ignore.

• Campaign Echo Mapping: Tracks which campaigns create ripples weeks or months later, so you can see real pipeline movement while everyone else argues over click-through rates.

• Weekly Ritual Automation: Simple templates and reminders to dig through your inbox, Slack mentions, and customer convos for hidden signal—because sometimes the best data lives in plain sight.

• Fully Customizable: No vendor lock-in, no monthly fees. You can tweak it, fork it, and adapt it to your stack. Want to pull in Airtable, HubSpot, Notion? Do it.

It’s not perfect yet (just a weekend of work), but it already compares with software that costs thousands every month. And more importantly, it gives us back control. Because here’s the thing about builders like us: we don’t wait for permission. We ship. We iterate. And in the age of AI, we can create systems that reveal the signals legacy tools will never catch.

This is just the start. Tell me what else you want to track, and I’ll help you build it. That’s how we win together.

Ready to Build What Others Can’t See?

If you’re reading this thinking, “Damn, I wish people were talking about my brand in iMessage threads, Slack chats, Discord servers, sharing it behind the scenes,” that’s what we do every day.

These are the same principles I used to help make Fireball Whisky a household name, and the same playbook we used to get a new brand 35 million views in just a few months.

I have 2 brand openings this summer. If you’re serious about building something people can’t stop talking about, let’s chat.

🔥 Book a Strategy Session → Let’s build the kind of brand that spreads where dashboards can’t see.

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