Overview
The Marketing Influence tab in Sona's Attribution dashboard shows how much of your revenue and how many of your accounts your marketing actually touched. It compares influenced deals with the rest on deal size and sales cycle, shows which channels pull more than their weight, and resolves your "dark" traffic (visits with no referrer) into accounts, including buyers who found you through AI answers and came to your site directly. Use it to prove marketing's impact, decide where to spend, and see the influence that referrer data alone misses.
Getting to Marketing Influence
Marketing Influence is a tab inside the Attribution dashboard, which lives under Insights in the left sidebar. To open it:
In the left sidebar, click Insights. If the sidebar is collapsed to icons, click the toggle at the top of the sidebar to expand it, or hover over an icon to see its label.
Under Insights, click Attribution.
At the top of the page, click the Marketing Influence tab.
Note: the Attribution model and date range controls in the top right work the same way as on the Revenue Attribution tab. See that article for the full list of models and date presets.
Choosing a view
Three views sit just below the tabs. Each one swaps the summary cards at the top of the page. The sections underneath stay the same.
Overview: marketing's share of revenue and accounts across every channel. This is the default view.
Paid Media: the same story narrowed to your paid channels.
AI & Zero-Click: pipeline, accounts, and revenue that came from AI answers.
The Overview cards are:
Revenue: total revenue across all marketing channels in the period.
Marketing Influence Revenue: the revenue your marketing influenced, shown against total revenue.
Marketing Influenced Accounts: the number of accounts your marketing touched, out of all accounts.
AI-Influenced Accounts: the accounts influenced by AI answers, as a count and a percentage of all accounts.
Paid Media view
Click Paid Media to focus the cards on paid channels:
Marketing Influenced Revenue: revenue influenced by all marketing channels, for reference.
Paid Media Influenced Revenue: revenue influenced by paid channels only.
Paid Media Signups: sign-ups that came through paid channels.
Paid Media MQLs: marketing qualified leads that came through paid channels.
Tip: the View full paid media dashboard link on the Revenue Attribution tab opens this view directly.
AI & Zero-Click view
Click AI & Zero-Click to see the business that AI answers helped create:
Pipeline Influenced: open opportunities influenced by AI.
Accounts Influenced: accounts sourced from AI.
Revenue Influenced: closed-won revenue credited to first-touch marketing, with a trend line.
Note: when there is not enough data yet, the Revenue Influenced card can show example figures and adds (sample) to its title. Treat those numbers as a preview, not your results.
Click the Expand icon in the corner of a card to open its detail view. It shows the Current Period value and dates, the Previous Period value, the Change between them, and a trend chart for the metric.
Revenue outcomes and channel performance
Revenue Outcomes by Marketing Influence puts influenced and non-influenced deals side by side:
Avg Deal Size: the average deal value for Influenced deals compared with Not influenced deals.
Sales Cycle Length: the average number of days to close for Influenced compared with Not influenced deals.
Marketing Channel Performance then shows which channels drive results:
Signup Share vs. Revenue Share by Marketing Channel: for each channel, the lighter bar is its share of the selected milestone and the solid bar is its share of revenue. Pick the milestone from the dropdown: Sign-ups, MQLs, or SQLs. A channel whose revenue share is above its funnel share is overperforming.
Breakdown by Marketing Channel: the selected milestone split by channel. Toggle between All and Paid channels, and pick the milestone from the dropdown.
Dark Traffic → Account Funnel: how resolved dark traffic moves through your funnel milestones. It needs milestones set up first. Until then, it shows No milestones configured for this organization. See Workspace Settings: Milestones.
Dark traffic and what buyers ask AI
Resolving your dark traffic takes visits that arrived with no referrer data and traces them back to the accounts and sources behind them.
Account total: the large number is how many accounts Sona resolved, with a stacked bar showing how they split across sources.
Source list: each source with its number of accounts and share, starting with AI Zero-Click. Click See All for the full list.
View toggle: switch between the list view and the Pie view.
AI zero-click summary: the line at the bottom shows what share of your "blank" traffic is AI zero-click influence, meaning buyers who saw you cited in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and then came to your site directly.
What buyers ask AI lists your site pages with their AI activity. Switch between All Site Pages and Watched Pages, and click any column header to sort:
Page: the page URL on your site.
Total indexed by AI: how many times AI platforms have indexed the page.
AI Referrals: visits referred to the page by AI platforms.
Traditional Referrals: visits referred by other sources, such as search engines and other websites.
Total referrals: AI and traditional referrals combined.
Click Show All to open the full list on the AI Visibility Site Pages tab. See AI Visibility: Site Pages.
Marketing channel metrics
The Marketing Channel Metrics table at the bottom of the page lists metrics for each marketing channel. It shows No data yet until there is channel data for the selected period.
How to use the tab
Compare Avg Deal Size and Sales Cycle Length for influenced and non-influenced deals to show marketing's effect on the quality and speed of revenue, not just the volume.
In Signup Share vs. Revenue Share, look for channels whose revenue share beats their sign-up share. Those are the channels worth more budget.
Check the AI zero-click share in Resolving your dark traffic to see how much of your direct traffic AI answers are driving.
Sort What buyers ask AI by AI Referrals to find the pages AI sends buyers to, then keep those pages accurate and up to date.
FAQs
What is the difference between the Overview, Paid Media, and AI & Zero-Click views?
What is the difference between the Overview, Paid Media, and AI & Zero-Click views?
Each view changes only the summary cards at the top of the page. Overview covers every marketing channel, Paid Media narrows the cards to paid channels, and AI & Zero-Click shows pipeline, accounts, and revenue from AI answers. Everything below the cards is the same in all three views.
What is dark traffic?
What is dark traffic?
Dark traffic is website traffic that arrives with no referrer data, so on its own it looks like a direct visit. Sona resolves those visits to accounts and shows which sources they most likely came from, including AI zero-click influence.
What does AI zero-click mean?
What does AI zero-click mean?
It describes buyers who saw your brand cited in an AI answer, for example in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, and then came to your site directly instead of clicking a link. That influence would otherwise be hidden inside your direct traffic.
Why does Dark Traffic → Account Funnel say no milestones are configured?
Why does Dark Traffic → Account Funnel say no milestones are configured?
The funnel is built from your milestones, so it stays empty until at least one milestone is set up. Configure them in Workspace Settings, then return to this tab.
Why does the Revenue Influenced card say "(sample)"?
Why does the Revenue Influenced card say "(sample)"?
When there is not enough data to calculate the figure yet, the card shows example numbers so you can see what it will look like. The (sample) label disappears once your own data is available.
What does "overperforming" mean in Signup Share vs. Revenue Share?
What does "overperforming" mean in Signup Share vs. Revenue Share?
It means a channel's share of revenue is higher than its share of the selected milestone. For example, a channel that brings 10% of sign-ups but 25% of revenue produces more valuable customers than its volume suggests.