Finding the Funnel MVP

Hey there Smarty 👋

Are you geared up to catch the latest and greatest in quick shorts?

And just a quick heads-up! If you stumbled upon us through a friend, make sure to subscribe here! That way, you’ll never miss out on the trending shorts.

🏃‍♂️ Stop Giving the Gold Medal to the Wrong Runner: Why Your Funnel’s MVP Isn’t Who You Think It Is

If your media reports make one ad look like it’s single-handedly carrying your business, there’s a good chance you’re looking at fraud.

Not because the numbers are fake, but because your attribution logic is.

Here’s the truth: your funnel is a relay race. And you’ve been handing all the medals to the anchor leg.

1. The Anchor Isn’t the Whole Team

In track, the fastest runner is often saved for last. But without the first leg exploding off the line, the second leg holding the pace, and the third keeping position, the anchor never even gets the baton.

That’s your funnel. The “winning” ad, you keep scaling to the moon? It’s just the closer. The credit belongs to the prospecting ad that made the introduction and the mid-funnel piece that kept the customer warm.

Ignore them, and your closer eventually has no one left to close.

2. How Misattribution Starves Growth

When you judge performance by last click, you inflate the ROAS of retargeting campaigns and undercut cold traffic. This looks great in the short term, lower CPCs, higher conversion rates, but it’s a funnel starvation strategy.

As you pull budget from top and middle stages to “feed the winner,” the pipeline dries up. That shiny ad suddenly “fatigues” not because the creative died, but because you cut off its supply chain.

3. Measuring the Full Relay

You don’t need a six-figure attribution tool to see the truth. Your analytics already show the handoffs if you know where to look:

• First-touch reports → Who introduced the customer?
• Assisted conversions → Which ads kept them in play?
• Last-touch reports → Who closed the sale?

When you see the baton pass, you stop killing top-of-funnel ads that look “weak” but are the reason your closer is even in the race.

4. Scaling Like a Relay Coach, Not a Fanboy

Great relay coaches don’t just train the anchor; they train the squad. Your budget should fuel all legs proportionally to their role:

• Prospecting = Lead leg → Needs volume and reach
• Mid-funnel = Middle legs → Needs depth and relevance
• Retargeting = Anchor → Needs precision and confidence

Get this right, and you’re not chasing a “winner.” You’re scaling a system.

Last-click obsession is why brands burn through “winning” creatives and blame fatigue. Funnel-aware attribution is why elite operators scale sustainably. The medal ceremony might look less dramatic when three ads share the podium, but your growth curve will look a hell of a lot better.

Together with Insense

💡 1 Creator. 20+ Scroll-Stoppers. All in Your Hands by Next Week.

Sourcing creators is slow. Editing takes forever. And testing? You never have enough assets.

Insense fixes all three.

Here’s how it works:

Send one brief → get 20+ raw and edited videos per creator in under 2 weeks.

Test multiple hooks, CTAs, visuals, and value props, all from a single shoot.

From Spark Ads and influencer gifting to TikTok Shop and Meta Partnership Ads, you’ll finally have the variety you need without killing your team.

That’s how brands like Solawave, Nurture Life, and Maty’s scale creative across every channel.

Every asset comes with full rights and cost under just $150 per creator.

Book your free strategy call by August 8 and get $200 toward your first campaign!

🔍 Bing’s lastmod Boost & Microsoft Ads’ New Exclusion Tools

Bing has updated its sitemap guidance, making the lastmod tag a top AI indexing signal, and Microsoft Ads has rolled out large‑scale website exclusion tools. Both aim to improve content visibility, crawl efficiency, and ad placement control.

The Breakdown:

1. Microsoft Ads Adds Bulk Website Exclusion Lists - Advertisers can now block up to 10,000 sites per list and manage 100 lists per account, applying them across campaigns. Exclusions can be set at account or campaign level, with campaign-level recommended for consistency. 

2. Bing Prioritizes lastmod for AI Recrawling - Bing now uses the lastmod field in sitemaps as a key factor in deciding whether to recrawl a page. It recommends ISO 8601 format with date and time, avoiding updates unless content has changed. The "changefreq" and "priority" tags are no longer used for crawling or ranking.

3. Boost Indexing with Accurate Sitemaps and IndexNow - Submitting sitemaps via robots.txt or Bing Webmaster Tools ensures immediate fetching and daily rechecks. Pairing them with IndexNow allows full‑site coverage plus real‑time URL updates. Bing supports up to 50k URLs per sitemap, 50k sitemaps per index file, and 2.5T URLs for enterprise‑scale sites.

Accurate sitemap signals help AI-driven search prioritize crawling, keeping content visible and fresh, while bulk website exclusions give advertisers tighter brand safety and placement control at scale. Together, they reduce wasted resources, improve efficiency, and ensure both content and ads are shown in the right place at the right time.

🚀Quick Hits 

📬 What if your free trial outperformed your best paid campaign? TrafficGrid gives you 200 U.S. subscribers who already open, click, and convert, before you ever pay. It works by matching your content to readers actively engaging in your niche using 30+ intent signals. If you’re publishing to 5,000+ U.S. subscribers, you qualify for the free test. Book your strategy call now.

🎥 YouTube is testing a new feature letting creators tag collaborators in video titles, boosting visibility for all involved channels and potentially driving more cross-traffic, similar to Instagram and TikTok collab tools.

💸 Meta, X, and Snapchat are running summer promos on premium plans. Meta Verified’s first month is heavily discounted, X Premium is 30% off annually, and Snapchat+ offers 50% off for two months.

🔍 After 7+ years as Google Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan is moving to a new “Director within Google Search” role, stepping back from public updates to focus on internal projects.

📊 Adthena launched AI Search Intelligence, giving marketers domain-specific insights into visibility on AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, tracking performance, link depth, and cross-platform presence daily.

That’s a wrap for today! Tell us your thoughts about today's content as we line up more Shorts! And don’t hesitate to share this with someone who’d adore it. 🥰