analytics

Dark data visualization of a smartphone with its advertising ID toggle off, location pings fading from a map, and a bidstream funnel beside a suppressed military base outline

The Pentagon Just Made Bidstream Location Data a Battlefield Liability

The U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command have all disabled advertising identifiers on government-issued phones and computers, TechCrunch reported on September 4. The trigger was U.S. Central Command confirming "multiple threat reports" of adversaries using commercially sold location data to target

Dark navy data dashboard showing a 52-week customer LTV cohort chart with a large 83% iROAS flip callout, representing Albertsons Media Collective's framework

Albertsons Added LTV After Its Own iROAS Audit Flipped 83% of Scores

Albertsons Media Collective added projected lifetime value as a core measurement metric on May 15, 2026, segmenting brand cohorts across a 52-week window. The framework validates within roughly 15% of historical campaign outcomes and follows an internal audit, run with Ovative and Northwestern's Kellogg School, where iROAS values

Dark data viz of a GA4 dashboard showing a tiny AI Assistant traffic bar next to a massive Direct traffic bar, with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude logos as recognized referrers.

GA4 Named Its AI Assistants Channel Around the 70.6% It Can't Actually See

Google Analytics rolled out a new AI Assistants channel on May 13, 2026, automatically tagging traffic from recognized chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude with the medium ai-assistant and grouping it in default reports. The channel only captures sessions that arrive with a recognized referrer header. ChatGPT's Atlas

Dark attribution funnel diagram with scales of justice at center, a walled-off TikTok section, conversion arrows, and 35% and 23x callouts

TikTok's Attribution Portfolio Is the Defendant Running Its Own Trial

TikTok launched its Attribution Portfolio on May 13, 2026, a four-tool suite inside Ads Manager that reports on TikTok's role in conversions where TikTok was not the last click. The headline finding: more than 1 in 4 TikTok-attributed conversions happen after a user sees an ad and then

Dark dashboard mockup showing Microsoft Clarity AI Citations metrics: page citations bar chart, share of authority panel, grounding queries list, AI referral traffic graph

Microsoft Just Folded $499/mo AI Citation Tracking Into a Free Clarity Tab

Microsoft moved AI Citations in Microsoft Clarity from limited preview to general availability on May 13, 2026. The dashboard tracks page citations, share of authority, AI referral traffic, and grounding queries for any site with the Clarity tag installed, with no traffic cap and no paid tier. That drops the

Google Handed 54 Publishers Discover Profile Control. 95% Forgot to Add UTMs.

Google quietly gave 54 US publishers control over their Discover profile pages between March and May 2026, adding banners, links shelves, and pinned posts to a surface that used to be algorithm-only. 41 of the 54 uploaded custom banners and 33 enabled the links shelf. Only 3 publishers added UTM

Dark GA4 dashboard with oversized Direct traffic slice and a stripped referrer header line above a conversion rate comparison chart

Last-Click Buries the 10.21% Converter. AI Strips 70.6% of Its Referrers.

Dan Taylor argued in MarTech on May 12 that last-click attribution rewards the wrong work in an AI-first world. The number that makes his case concrete is the one his piece left out: 70.6% of AI-driven sessions arrive with no referrer header, which dumps the highest-converting traffic on the