For years, influencer marketing has operated with a massive, data-shaped hole in its center. Brands are excellent at measuring the "top" of the funnel - likes, impressions, and reach. They are also proficient at the "bottom" - discount code redemptions and affiliate link conversions.

But everything in between - the critical ‘middle funnel’ where intent is forged - remains a "black box." This isn't just a reporting nuance; it’s a measurement crisis. Without middle-funnel visibility, you aren't just missing data; you are almost certainly under-reporting the true ROI of your influencer spend.

The Measurement Gap: Why Your Brand Site is a Data Desert

In theory, middle-funnel data exists on your ecommerce site. In practice, it is nearly impossible to extract. When you send traffic from a social app directly to a standard product page, two major obstacles strip away your visibility:

The In-App Browser Trap: Most social clicks open in "in-app browsers" (like Instagram’s internal browser). These are notorious for stripping away attribution data and failing to pass cookies effectively. Just at the point that your user is beginning to shop, your analytics go dark and you’ve lost the connection to the original creator.

The "Dark Social" Mystery: A user sees a creator post, gets inspired, but doesn't click immediately. Instead, they open Safari or Chrome later and search for the brand directly. This is "Dark Social" - immense influence that shows up in your dashboard as "Direct Traffic," giving the creator zero credit for the assist.

‘Direct Traffic’ is in fact a misnomer – it is really unattributed traffic where the source is uncertain, including where the shopper has gone directly to the brand's website. In recent years the proportion of ‘direct traffic’ has increased for most brands. This isn’t a cause for celebration that your brand is becoming better known, but more likely a tracking failure where the traffic originates on social media and the customer heads to the site directly. Exit surveys typically confirm this.  

Even if the data survives the technical hurdles, ‘organizational silos’ often kill the insight. Influencer marketers rarely have the same level of access to deep GA4 or Adobe Analytics as the e-commerce team. The data is locked behind a different department’s door, making it impossible for influencer managers to prove that a creator didn't just drive a "click," but actually sparked a 20-minute shopping session.

The Dangerous Cost of Under-Reporting ROI

The consequence of this "data hole" is that brands are making decisions based on fiction. When you only measure what you can see (affiliate links and codes), you are looking at the tip of the iceberg.

In one campaign we recently analyzed, we found 20x more revenue in the "missing middle" than was reported by traditional affiliate tracking. Imagine a campaign that appears to have only generated $5,000 in sales through tracked links. In a standard review, that campaign might be declared a failure. However, the storefront data revealed an additional $100,000 in revenue driven by those same shoppers through discovery and delayed conversion.

Without a storefront to capture this, a massive success is mislabeled as a failure. Storefronts aren't a "nice to have"; they are now essential for measuring campaign ROI accurately.

Merchandising: Turning a "Click" into a "Journey"

The reason the ‘missing middle’ is so important, is because this is where intent is formed, and a good storefront will encourage exploration and discovery. Shoppers buy by exploring alternates. They want to see the matching accessory or the "other colors" the creator mentioned. By providing a curated, high-discovery environment on the brand's own domain, storefronts turn a single product view into a deep exploratory session. This is where a lot of value is generated: in many cases good merchandising will drive not only higher engagement and levels of intent, but also higher Average Order Values and conversion rates. If you can achieve all three together, this can create a compounding effect resulting in 20x more value created in the ‘missing middle.’

Sending traffic to a Product Detail Page is a very different experience, focused on only one product. Because of this it is often a dead end; if the user doesn't like the one specific product linked, they bounce. We find that merchandising frequently generates half of the subsequent clicks as shoppers explore "similar products" or different categories adjacent to those being promoted.

The Retargeting Goldmine: Capturing the "Pre-Sold" Audience

The most painful loss in influencer marketing is the "high-intent non-buyer." These are people who watched a 60-second video, felt a connection to the creator, clicked through to the storefront, and browsed for 15 or 30 minutes - but didn't pull the trigger.

In a traditional model, these people are anonymous and gone. But with a Creator Storefront, they become your most valuable retargeting pool:

• Deeply Pre-Sold: These aren't "cold" leads from a random display ad. They have already invested time in the creator’s content and your products.
• Low-Hanging Fruit: Because they spent significant time on the storefront, their intent is sky-high.
• Continuous Attribution: Because the storefront lives on a domain you control, you can build specific audience segments. When you serve them a retargeting ad two days later, you are following up on a conversation started by a creator they trust.

The New Standard

Measurement is the #1 concern for influencer marketers today, but the solution isn't "better" cookies; it’s a better destination.

By moving to a "link-to-storefront" model, brands stop treating influencers like digital billboards and start treating them like the powerful engines of discovery they are. The storefront is the only place where you can reliably see and measure the discovery, the intent, and the true revenue impact of your campaigns.

‍