About the session
You're in a budget conversation defending a channel you believe in: a podcast sponsorship, a paid social push, an influencer placement. You don't have the numbers to back it up, so you lose to search. Again.
The reason is usually the same one. A large share of your conversions are landing in direct, and in one project we're running right now, inside a paid enterprise attribution tool, that share is 74%. What's sitting inside direct isn't a random sample of your traffic, it's whatever is hardest to track. So budget keeps flowing to whatever is easiest to measure, not to whatever is actually working.
Barbara Galiza will walk through why that happens and what you can do about it, with Timo Dechau joining for the technical causes and the identity stitching work that recovers part of that signal.
What to expect
Live webinar, September 17
Hosted by Barbara Galiza, with Timo Dechau joining for the technical sections. 45 minutes of presentation, then 15 minutes of live Q&A.
Understand why your direct percentage is a budget problem, not a reporting problem
See which of your channels are actually at risk, and which ones nobody expects to track anyway
Walk through five concrete methods for recovering the signal sitting in direct
Leave with real evidence to bring into your next budget conversation
What we'll cover
Direct isn't a channel, it's the reason your best channels look weak
We'll cover:
- Why the visible part of your attribution report is a skewed sample, not a small one, and what that does to your budget decisions
- Which initiatives are actually at risk: podcast sponsorships, paid social, influencer and newsletter placements, dark social, the channels that feel measurable but aren't
- What actually creates direct traffic: missing UTMs, in-app browsers, redirects that strip parameters, offline conversions, and AI assistants that don't tag their links
- Five methods for recovering that signal, roughly in order of effort: UTM discipline, post-purchase surveys, vanity URLs and landing pages, identity stitching, and incrementality testing
- Why this has to run in your data warehouse, not inside your analytics tool
- What the evidence looks like once you have it, including a recent client that took direct and referral from 51% down to 8%
No method reclassifies all of your direct traffic, and any tool that promises that is hiding a black box. This is incremental work, it depends on owning your own data, usually in the warehouse rather than your analytics tool, and results come from tuning over time. It can also cut the other way: sometimes recovering the signal shows a channel genuinely isn't performing. The goal is valid evidence, not a better-looking case for what you already believed.
Who it's for
Built for the people defending the budget
Marketing leads & budget owners
For marketing leads, growth and performance marketers, and marketing ops at companies spending meaningfully on paid media across more than just search.
Data & analytics support
For the data and analytics people supporting those budget decisions, even though the session is framed for the marketing side of the table throughout.
Especially useful if a channel you believe in is up for a cut, you're being asked to justify top-of-funnel or brand spend, or direct already makes up a large share of your attribution report. No coding required. Bring your questions, we'll keep time for live Q&A.
Event details
Save your seat
Date
Sept 17, 2026
Thursday
Time
12:00 PM ET
6:00 PM CEST · 9:00 AM PT
Format
Live webinar
45 min + 15 min Q&A
Seats
Free
Capped at 200
About the hosts
Barbara Galiza
Barbara leads marketing measurement strategy at Propel. Over the past 10 years she has helped brands like Microsoft, Mollie, and VEED.io answer the question every marketer dreads: what is actually driving results?
Timo Dechau
Timo leads data engineering at Propel. He builds the tracking systems marketing teams wish they could trust, and has done it for companies like Amplitude, Shimano, Cricut, and Audible.
Barbara leads the session end to end. Timo joins where he has something to add, mainly the causes of direct, identity stitching, and the warehouse requirement.