A shopper hears about a brand from a friend, buys it a week later, and the dashboard files the sale under "direct". According to a new study of 3,303,402 post-purchase survey responses across 3,237 online stores, that is what happens to more than half of ecommerce orders, and the customers involved know precisely how they found the brand. The analytics simply has no column for the answer.
The Zigpoll Attribution Index, published by survey and attribution platform Zigpoll, asked customers how they heard about the brand immediately after purchase and matched each answer to the source the store's own analytics recorded for that same order. 51.8% of orders arrived with no usable source.
The comfortable explanation is that those customers cannot remember. They can. Among untracked orders, 8.3% of customers said they did not know how they had found the brand. Among tracked orders, the figure was 7.3%. The two groups are equally certain; only one of them was recorded.
What the untracked customers said is the finding marketers will recognise. They named word of mouth 32% more often than tracked customers did, and YouTube 40% more often. Measured from the channel's side, a word-of-mouth sale goes untracked 58.7% of the time and a YouTube sale 60.2%. A Facebook sale, which arrives with a click identifier attached, goes untracked 40.1% of the time.
"Every brand has had the argument about what 'direct' means, and it always ends the same way: someone says brand strength, someone says broken tracking, and the meeting moves on because there was never a way to settle it," said Jason Zigelbaum, founder of Zigpoll. "Now there is, and the answer is worse than either. Those customers were sent by a friend or a video. The report gave the credit to whatever they clicked last. So when the budget review asks each channel to prove itself, the channels creating the most demand are structurally the least able to answer, and they are the ones that get cut. Word of mouth doesn't get a seat in that meeting. It should."
The timing matters. Brands are setting 2027 budgets on last-click reporting over the next eight weeks, and peak season is when the gap between where demand is created and where it is captured gets widest.
Share of sales with no tracked source, by the channel the customer named:
- YouTube — 60.2%
- Word of mouth — 58.7%
- Press and editorial — 56.4%
- TikTok — 56.3%
- Creator and influencer — 54.6%
- Podcast — 51.8%
- Instagram — 50.8%
- Search — 50.1%
- Facebook — 40.1%
The study also puts a first number on a channel that leaves no trace at all. The share of shoppers naming an AI assistant as how they found a brand rose from 0.23% in December 2025 to 1.10% in August 2026, a 4.8-fold increase in eight months and the fastest-moving line in the dataset. It is still roughly one stated discovery in ninety. But a shopper who asks an assistant and types the brand name two days later arrives as "direct", which means the channel will grow inside the blind spot rather than beside it.
The practical test is a cheap one. A brand that asks the customers in its own direct bucket how they found it will get one of two answers. If they cannot say, the tracking is fine and the bucket is brand equity. If they say a friend or a video, the brand is allocating budget from a report that cannot see the channel doing the work.
The Attribution Index is published quarterly, with tables for nine retail verticals published alongside the aggregate at
https://www.zigpoll.com/attribution-index. All figures are free to reproduce with attribution, and Zigpoll will provide channel or category cuts to journalists on request.
Methodology: Findings are drawn from 3,303,402 responses to "how did
you hear about us" questions, collected between 18 September 2025 and 18 September 2026 across 3,237 ecommerce stores using Zigpoll. Only responses attached to a completed order were included, so that a customer's stated answer could be compared with the source recorded for that same order. Responses were grouped into channels by an open, rule-based mapping; answers that could not be confidently classified were reported separately rather than assigned to a category, and represent 12.7% of the total. No channel figure is reported unless at least 50 distinct stores contributed to it. Time series use complete calendar months only. Stores using Zigpoll are not a random sample of ecommerce, and the figures describe that population rather than the market as a whole.
Zigpoll is a survey and attribution platform for ecommerce brands, used to collect post-purchase, on-site and abandoned-checkout feedback and to connect what customers say to what they buy. The Zigpoll Attribution Index is published quarterly at https://www.zigpoll.com/attribution-index.
