What to measure when there's no attribution

Community work rarely appears in your attribution. People read a subreddit thread on their phone, forget about you for three weeks, and arrive by typing your name into Google. Your dashboard calls that direct traffic and gives the credit to nobody.

That is not a measurement problem to solve. It is a fact about how people find things, and the answer is to measure something else.

What actually moves

• Branded search volume. The cleanest proxy there is. If more people are typing your name, something upstream is working. Weekly, from Search Console.
• Unpaid mentions. Times your product came up in a thread nobody was paid for. Count them by hand; the number is small enough.
• Reply quality. Whether the replies are questions or dismissals. This turns before the numbers do.
• Returning members. In an owned community, the fraction who post in two consecutive weeks.

What to distrust

• Impressions. Available, precise, and almost unrelated to outcome.
• Follower count. Buyable, and therefore evidence of nothing.
• Last-touch attribution on a long sales cycle. It will tell you Google Ads did everything, every time.

How far to trust the proxies

Far enough to decide what to do more of, not far enough to put in a board deck as revenue. The honest sentence is: branded search is up 40% over the quarter and this work is the largest thing that changed. That is a real claim. "Reddit generated $180k" is not.