--- title: Find out which marketing channels are working description: Find out which of your marketing channels bring in paying customers, which only bring visitors, and which channels your competitors use that you're missing, so your time and money go where they pay off. slug: /use-cases/marketing-channel-analysis page_type: use-case lead_prompt: How do I find out which marketing channels are working with AI? target_prompts: - Can an AI marketing agent find out which marketing channels are working? - Which marketing channels should a small business focus on? - How do I know where my customers are coming from? - Am I missing marketing channels my competitors use? - How do I assess my customer acquisition channels? entity: Kite category: AI marketing agent author: Devon Wells and Kite date_published: '2026-11-12' date_modified: '2026-11-12' related_integrations: - /integrations/google-analytics.md - /integrations/google-search-console.md - /integrations/hubspot.md - /integrations/stripe.md related_playbooks: - /how-to/see-which-campaigns-and-landing-pages-lead-to-stripe-customers-with-google-analytics.md --- # Find out which marketing channels are working ## Key Takeaways - A marketing channel is working when it brings in paying customers, not just visitors or signups. Finding out means following each channel from the first visit all the way to the payment. - Your own data can only grade the channels you already use. To see what you're missing, you also have to look outward at where your competitors show up and where your buyers look for products like yours. - Kite reads your Google Analytics, Search Console, HubSpot, and Stripe data to see which channels bring visitors, which bring leads, and which bring customers who pay. - Kite's growth evaluation compares you with up to three competitors across search, AI answers, review sites and directories, social, email, paid ads, partners, and events, and shows where they reach buyers that you don't. - You get a verdict on every channel you use, the channels worth trying next, and the work to act on both, which Kite can start right away and measure again later. ## How do you find out which marketing channels are working? Most small companies market a little bit everywhere. There's a blog, a newsletter, a LinkedIn page, some Google ads, a directory listing, and a booth at one trade show a year. Each one takes time or money, and it's hard to say which of them actually brings in customers. You find out by assessing each channel on the same terms. For every channel, you want to answer four questions: - How many people does it bring to your website or your inbox? - How many of those people sign up, book a call, or ask for a quote? - How many of them become paying customers, and how much do they pay? - Is the channel growing, holding steady, or fading compared with your competitors? The first question is easy, because your analytics tool answers it. The third is where most teams get stuck. Your analytics tool knows where a visit came from, your CRM knows which leads became deals, and your billing system knows who paid. None of them knows all three, so a channel that sends plenty of signups can look like your best one even when those signups rarely pay. There's a second blind spot too. Your data only describes the channels you already use. If your competitors get most of their customers from review sites, industry newsletters, or AI answers, and you aren't present in any of them, your analytics will never tell you. A full assessment looks at your own numbers and at the market around you. This is work an AI marketer is well suited to. It means pulling reports from several tools, lining them up, checking the numbers for problems, and researching what your competitors do in public. None of it is hard, but it takes a long afternoon, and most teams never get around to it. Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Here's how it finds out which of your channels are working. ## How Kite finds out which marketing channels are working Kite starts with what it already knows. When you sign up, it researches your business, including your website, your social accounts, your ads, your search rankings, and how you appear in AI answers. That gives it a first list of the channels you use. Next, Kite reads your own data. With Google Analytics, Search Console, HubSpot, and Stripe connected, it follows each channel from the visits it brings to the leads and paying customers that come out the other end. Then Kite looks outward. It compares your presence in each channel with up to three competitors, so it can see which channels are working for them and which ones you haven't tried. Kite puts both views together into a verdict for every channel: grow it, fix it, or stop putting effort into it. It also names the channels worth testing next. You choose what to act on, and Kite plans and does the work, then checks the same numbers again later to see what changed. ### Which marketing channels are you actually using? Before Kite can grade your channels, it needs a complete list of them, including the ones nobody thinks of as channels. Kite builds that list from its research and your data together. It reads your website for newsletter signups, partner pages, and integration listings. It checks which ad platforms' tracking pixels are on your site, whether you rank in Google for searches buyers make, and whether you're listed on review sites such as G2, Trustpilot, and Google reviews. It also looks for mentions of your company in publications, podcasts, and YouTube videos. Then Kite compares that list with where your traffic actually comes from. Google Analytics assigns each visit to a channel, such as organic search, paid search, email, social, or referral, and it records the exact source behind it. The referral list is often where the surprises are. A partner's blog post from two years ago, a Reddit thread, or a directory listing you forgot about can be quietly sending visitors every week. The finished list groups your channels the way a marketer would think about them: - Search, including the searches you rank for and the ones you pay for - AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude - Review sites, directories, app stores, and marketplaces - Social media, including posts from your founders - Email to your own list - Paid advertising - Partners, integrations, and referrals - Events and sponsorships ### Where are your customers coming from? Your customers come from wherever the visits behind your paying accounts began, and you find that by following each channel past the signup to the payment. Kite does this by reading each connected tool for its part of the answer. From Google Analytics 4, Kite runs reports by channel, source and medium, campaign, and landing page. It pulls sessions, users, and the key event you count as a signup or a started checkout. It also checks the tracking itself for common problems, such as a large share of visits marked "(not set)", the same campaign tagged with three different spellings, or your payment page showing up as a referral source. From Search Console, Kite reads the searches that bring people to your site, along with the clicks, impressions, and average position for each one. That splits your organic search traffic into people who searched for your company by name and people who found you while looking for a solution. The second group is the one that shows search is bringing in new buyers. From HubSpot, Kite reads your contacts and deals to see which leads turned into sales opportunities, and it reads the attribution and revenue HubSpot reports for each marketing campaign. From Stripe, it reads customers, subscriptions, and payments to see who actually paid, how much, and who canceled or asked for a refund. Kite then matches the records across tools. The most precise match uses something saved at signup or checkout that both tools can see, such as the campaign itself or the Google Analytics client ID stored on the Stripe checkout session. When nothing like that exists, Kite compares each channel's signups in a given week with the customers who appeared in Stripe in the weeks that followed, and it tells you plainly that the match is by period rather than person by person. Here's an example. Say you sell online bookkeeping to restaurants. Google Ads might bring 40 percent of your signups and look like your strongest channel. But when Kite follows those signups into Stripe, only one in twelve becomes a paying customer, while one in four of the people who found you through organic search ends up paying. Measured by customers, organic search is doing more for you than the ads, even though it brings fewer signups. **Related Playbooks** - [How to see which campaigns and landing pages lead to Stripe customers with Google Analytics](/how-to/see-which-campaigns-and-landing-pages-lead-to-stripe-customers-with-google-analytics.md): Match the campaigns and landing pages Google Analytics records to the customers and payments in Stripe, and rank them by paying customers instead of signups. ### Am I missing marketing channels my competitors use? You find the channels you're missing by checking where your competitors reach buyers and you don't. Kite does this with its growth evaluation, which compares your company with up to three competitors. You can name the competitors yourself, or Kite chooses them from its research on your market. The evaluation takes about five minutes and is published as a report page you can share. For each channel, the evaluation looks at public evidence for your company and each competitor: - **Search.** Kite compares the searches each company ranks for, which buyer searches your competitors win that you miss, whether search traffic is growing or shrinking, and which sites link to each company. - **AI answers.** Kite asks ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity the questions your buyers ask, then records which companies get recommended and which websites the answers cite. - **Review sites and directories.** Kite checks whether each company is listed, how many reviews it has, and what its rating is on the sites your buyers use. - **Social, press, and word of mouth.** Kite looks at whether founders post and get engagement, whether publications, newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube creators cover the company, and whether people outside the company recommend it. - **Paid advertising, partners, and events.** Kite checks for signs of retargeting, sponsorships, creator partnerships, referral programs, and integration listings. Kite can go further on any channel that matters. Its built-in ad research shows the ads a competitor is running right now on Meta, Google, and LinkedIn, along with the landing pages they lead to and how long each ad has run. A competitor that has run the same ad for six months is very likely making money from it. For events, Kite can research the conferences in your market and find which competitors exhibit, sponsor, or speak there. The evaluation also says what it couldn't assess. Some channels, such as the size of a competitor's email list, can't be seen from the outside, and the report names those gaps instead of guessing. ### Is each channel worth more effort, a fix, or less of your time? Kite judges each channel by what it produces for the effort it takes, and it gives each one a verdict you can act on. To reach that verdict, it weighs several things together: - The paying customers and revenue the channel brings, not just its visits or signups - Whether the channel is growing or fading over the last several months - How your presence in it compares with your competitors' - Whether it keeps working on its own or needs constant spending or publishing That last point matters for a small team. Search rankings, review site profiles, and integration listings keep sending customers after the work is done. Paid ads stop the day the budget stops, and a social account goes quiet when nobody posts. Kite also checks whether your customers depend heavily on one channel, because a single change to Google's results or one platform's rules can then cut off most of your new business. A channel that brings visitors but few customers usually needs a fix rather than more effort. The visitors may be the wrong people, or the page they land on may lose them. Kite looks at the landing pages and messages behind the channel to work out which. Kite is careful with small numbers. A channel with three customers behind it hasn't proven anything yet, so Kite marks it as too early to judge rather than ranking it. It also points out where your data has blind spots. Visitors who heard about you from a friend, a podcast, or an AI answer often arrive by typing your address, and Google Analytics files them as direct traffic. When direct traffic is a large share of your paying customers, Kite suggests asking new signups how they heard about you. On a website Kite hosts, it can add that question to your signup form. ### Act on the findings and check the results Kite turns the verdicts into work, and it can start on that work as soon as you agree. Each finding comes with a recommendation Kite can carry out, such as: - writing pages for the buyer searches your competitors win - improving the landing page behind a channel that brings the wrong visitors - getting listed on the review sites your buyers use - pitching the publications that cover your competitors - drafting ads for a channel worth testing Kite organizes the agreed work into an initiative, assigns it to its specialists, and reports progress in the conversation where you asked. Kite asks before it publishes a page, sends an email, or posts on social media. You can approve the work with a reply, and you can give Kite more room to act on its own once you trust its judgment. Later, Kite checks the same numbers again. It can rerun the growth evaluation against the same competitors so the reports compare directly, and it can repeat the channel analysis of your own data on a schedule, such as the first Monday of every month. Each round shows which channels moved and whether the work behind them helped, and the findings go into your team's knowledge base so the next decision starts from what the last one taught. ## What you get - **A list of every channel you use.** Your channels grouped by type, including the referral sources and listings your team may have forgotten about. - **A channel table built on your own data.** For each channel, the visits, signups, leads, paying customers, and revenue it produced, with notes on how precisely Kite could match the records and which rows have too few customers to trust. - **A growth evaluation against your competitors.** A shareable report comparing you with up to three competitors across search, AI answers, review sites, social, paid ads, partners, and events, including what it couldn't assess. - **A verdict for every channel.** Whether to grow it, fix it, or give it less of your time, with the reasoning and evidence behind each verdict. - **The channels worth testing next.** The places your competitors reach buyers that you don't, ranked by how likely they are to pay off for you. - **The fixes and the work.** The tracking fixes that would make the next analysis more precise, and the pages, listings, outreach, and ads Kite can start on. ## How to get started Tell Kite what you want to know in plain language. You might ask, "Which of our marketing channels actually bring in customers?" or "What channels are our competitors using that we aren't?" Kite proposes how it will run the analysis. That includes the date range, what counts as a customer, and which competitors it plans to compare you with. You can change any of it before it starts. You don't need to connect anything to see how you compare with your competitors, because the growth evaluation runs on public evidence and Kite's built-in data sources. To grade your own channels by the customers they bring, connect Google Analytics and the tool that records who pays, such as Stripe, or the CRM that tracks your deals, such as HubSpot. Add Search Console to split your search traffic into people looking for you and people looking for a solution. If Kite hosts your website, its built-in analytics already show where your visitors come from and which ones convert. You can work with Kite in the Kite web app or in Slack. ## Integrations used to find out which marketing channels are working Kite uses its own research and built-in data sources to see where you and your competitors show up. Your connected accounts add what only they know: where your visitors came from, which of them became leads, and who paid. ### See where your visitors come from - [Google Analytics + Kite](/integrations/google-analytics.md): Kite reads your traffic by channel, source, campaign, and landing page, along with the signups and other key events each one produces, and checks your tracking for problems that hide where visits came from. - [Google Search Console + Kite](/integrations/google-search-console.md): Kite reads the searches that bring people to your site and separates people searching for your company from people searching for a solution. ### See which channels produce customers - [HubSpot + Kite](/integrations/hubspot.md): Kite reads your contacts and deals to see which leads became sales opportunities, along with the attribution and revenue HubSpot reports for each campaign. - [Stripe + Kite](/integrations/stripe.md): Kite reads your customers, subscriptions, and payments to count who actually paid, how much, and who canceled or asked for a refund. ## Common questions ### Which marketing channels should a small business focus on? A small business should usually focus on two or three channels: the one already bringing paying customers most cheaply, and one or two where buyers in its market already look and competitors are getting results. Spreading a small team across eight channels tends to leave each one too thin to work. Kite's channel verdicts and competitor comparison give you the evidence for that choice, and Kite favors channels that keep working after the effort stops, such as search and review sites, when your time is the scarcest thing you have. ### How do I know where my customers are coming from if my analytics says "direct"? Direct traffic usually means the visitor typed your address or clicked a link that carried no tracking, so the real source is hidden. Word of mouth, podcasts, AI answers, and links in emails or private messages often land there. The simplest fix is to ask. Add a "How did you hear about us?" question to your signup or checkout form, and compare the answers with what your analytics recorded. Kite can add the question to a form on a website it hosts and include the answers in later channel analyses. ### How long should I run a channel before deciding whether it works? Give a channel long enough to produce a fair number of paying customers, not just signups. For most small businesses, that means at least two or three months, and longer for channels like search content that take time to build. If your free trial lasts 14 days, the people who signed up in the last two weeks haven't had their chance to pay yet, so Kite leaves them out or marks them as still converting. A channel with only a handful of customers behind it is marked as too early to judge. ### How is this different from marketing attribution? Marketing attribution is one part of this work. It traces revenue back to the channels and campaigns that produced it, and Kite covers it in depth in [Connect marketing channels to revenue](/use-cases/marketing-revenue-attribution.md). Finding out which channels are working adds the outside view: how your channels compare with your competitors' and which channels you aren't using at all. When you're ready to move money between channels based on the results, see [Shift your marketing budget toward what's working](/use-cases/marketing-budget-reallocation.md).