Before You Add a Channel, Measure the Ones You Have
Adding a channel feels like progress. Often it just spreads the same budget thinner across more guesswork.
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By Joris van Huët, Founder & CEOPublished 2 min read
New Is Not the Same as Better
Adding a sales channel divides your attention and budget across more surfaces, and doing it before you understand which existing channels cause revenue usually means funding a new guess with money pulled from a working channel you never identified. Motion is not progress.
The pull is strong. Growth feels stalled, a new platform is trending, so you add it. But if you could not say which of your current channels is actually driving incremental sales, you are not expanding from strength. You are adding a variable to an equation you had not solved.
The Hidden Cost of the New Channel
Every new channel taxes the ones you have: budget, team hours, creative, and analytical attention all get split. If some of what you pull comes from a channel that was quietly your best demand creator, the new channel can post decent numbers while total growth flatlines, because you fed it with your own engine. Your blended dashboard will not flag this. It never does.
Solve the Current Map First
Before the new bet, get the current map right. A causal attribution read on your Google Analytics export shows which channels create demand and which harvest it, so you know what you are protecting before you dilute it. Then add the new channel as a proper test, with a holdout, and keep it only if it earns net-new revenue.
Expand from a map, not from a hunch.
Frequently asked questions
Should I add a new sales channel to grow?
Adding a sales channel divides your attention and budget across more surfaces, and doing it before you understand which existing channels cause revenue usually means funding a new guess with money pulled from a working channel you never identified.How do you measure it?
Upload your Google Analytics export and a causal attribution read estimates each channel's incremental contribution with a confidence score, so you can see which existing channels drive incremental revenue before you dilute them instead of guessing.
Go deeper: Causal attribution, explained.
Sixty-second versions of these ideas: Causality Engine on YouTube Shorts.
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Terms in this article
- AnalyticsAnalytics is the systematic computational analysis of data. It reveals customer behavior and measures campaign performance.
- AttributionAttribution identifies user actions that contribute to a desired outcome and assigns value to each. It reveals which marketing touchpoints drive conversions.
- Causal AttributionCausal Attribution uses causal inference to determine which marketing touchpoints genuinely cause conversions, not just correlate with them.
- DashboardA dashboard is a visual display of key information required to achieve specific objectives. It consolidates data onto a single screen for quick review.
- Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics is a web analytics service that tracks and reports website traffic.
- IncrementalityIncrementality is the part of an outcome, such as orders or revenue, that a marketing activity caused: the extra results compared with what would have happened without it. It is a causal effect, not the number of conversions credited to a channel.
- RevenueRevenue is the total income generated by the sale of goods or services related to a company's primary operations.