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Iron City DispatchIron City DispatchTechnology, platforms and the business of the internet

Elsewhere on the Dispatch

Most substantial reads

  1. 01The Rise of Fintech in Digital Leisure: Instant Payouts and Secure Wallets Explained
  2. 02Privacy by Design: Building Compliant iGaming Platforms Under GDPR and CCPA
  3. 03Cross-Border Payments: FX, Chargebacks, and Risk Controls
  4. 04Latency Matters: Why Milliseconds Count in Real-Time Internet Services
  5. 05Social Features and Community Tools That Drive Retention
Section

Audience & Growth

Measurement, attribution and the unglamorous plumbing of acquisition — written for people who have to defend the numbers.

What counts as a Growth piece

This desk is written for the person who has to stand up in a meeting and defend a number. That makes measurement the subject and tactics the consequence, rather than the other way round: how a conversion is defined, what the attribution window does to the credit, which events are modelled rather than observed, and what happens to a reported figure when consent rates move underneath it. A tactic that works only until somebody checks the instrumentation is not a growth story, it is a reporting error with a budget.

The desk is sceptical of two things in particular. The first is any single metric offered as the health of a business, because a number that cannot be decomposed cannot be acted on. The second is a benchmark without a population — an average that does not say whose average it is, measured how, over what period. Where a figure here comes from a platform’s own documentation, the piece says so and says when it was read, because those documents are revised without notice.

01

Everything in this section

Growth

The 0.30% Spam Complaint Rate That Blocks Gmail and Yahoo Inboxes

Spam complaints, not subject-line cleverness, decide whether your bulk mail reaches an inbox. Google's published guidance advises bulk senders to keep complaint rates below 0.10% and avoid reaching 0.30%, measured against delivered mail rather than messages sent. Cross that second line and your mail starts routing to spam folders—or disappears entirely.

20 Jun 2026
5 min

Growth

How to Tell a Dying Keyword From a Seasonal One

A single year-over-year traffic drop proves nothing. The same dip could mean summer slowness, permanent demand collapse, or Google simply keeping the answer on its own page. The only way to know is to compare whole cycles—several years of the same weeks, mapped against market-wide data and whatever the results page looked like at the time.

22 Dec 2025
4 min

Growth

Postback or Pixel: Why Two Attribution Reports Disagree by a Fifth

When your affiliate dashboard shows a different number of conversions and your internal analytics counts a different number, the gap is rarely a mystery. The two systems are often measuring different things: browser-side pixels fire from the user's device when a page loads, while server-to-server postbacks transmit from your backend after a transaction completes.

18 Aug 2025
5 min

Growth

Cookie Lifetime Caps Are Rewriting the Definition of a Returning Visitor

A user who returns to a site after eight days can count as two visitors instead of one. Adobe's documentation states that under a seven-day expiry, a visitor returning on day eight is treated as new. The metric no longer measures loyalty. It measures identifier survival.

25 Jun 2025
4 min

Independent trade desk. We take no commission on anything we describe and run no affiliate programme of our own. Every figure on this page names the standard, filing or organisation it comes from; where a number could not be verified the page says so. How we work and how we correct. Reviewed:

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