The retargeting blindspot nobody measures
If 93% of your SALs come from one channel, you don't have a funnel — you have a measurement problem dressed up as performance.
If 93% of your sales-accepted leads come from one channel, most people celebrate. I get nervous.
Because that number almost never means the channel is working. It means you're only measuring one channel properly.
The problem with last-click
Most retargeting programs are built on last-click attribution. You see the ad, you click, you convert — the ad gets the credit. Clean, simple, wrong.
What last-click doesn't show you: the five touchpoints before the click. The search that started the intent. The LinkedIn post someone read three weeks ago. The colleague who forwarded your case study PDF.
You're not measuring a funnel. You're measuring a finish line.
The test I run on every account
When I take on a new client, I ask for their channel attribution report and their CAC by channel. Then I ask one question: what would happen to your numbers if you turned off your retargeting for 30 days?
Nine times out of ten, the answer is "we'd die." That's not performance. That's dependency.
A healthy funnel can survive 30 days without retargeting because the other channels are building intent. If yours can't, the retargeting isn't driving growth — it's collecting credit for growth that happened somewhere else.
What to do about it
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Run a holdout test. Take 10% of your retargeting audience and suppress ads for them for 30 days. Compare conversion rates. The gap is your real retargeting lift — everything else is organic you were already going to get.
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Track view-through separately from click-through. View-through conversions inflate attribution numbers by design. If someone saw your ad and converted two weeks later via direct, that's not a retargeting conversion.
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Build a channel map, not a channel report. Stop asking "which channel drove this conversion" and start asking "which channels were present in the last 90 days for accounts that converted." It's a different question with a different answer.
The retargeting blindspot isn't that retargeting doesn't work. It's that most companies have no idea how much of their retargeting "performance" is actually organic conversion they were already going to get — just slower.
Measure the increment. Optimise the increment. Everything else is a story you're telling yourself.