For years, user data left a clear trail of breadcrumbs for marketers to follow. Now, in the age of signal loss, that trail goes cold almost immediately—and the old maps are useless. The decay of long-funnel attribution isn't a temporary problem to be solved; it's a permanent reality that demands marketers must race against the clock for visibility.

Marco Fernandez, Senior UA Manager at Hard Rock Digital and a veteran of growth teams at ByteDance and Playco, believes the answer lies in a radical new focus.

A 24-hour window: Playbooks are out the window for marketers, as the entire funnel has been upended. "We have to focus entirely on early data points," Fernandez states. "Visibility into the mid- and low-funnel? That's gone. You can’t optimize for a paying user who only converts after three days."

This reality forces a fundamental shift in strategy, moving from chasing distant conversions to dissecting early behavior to find a reliable proxy. “We asked, ‘What behaviors do our payers have in common in the first 24 hours?’ For one game, we realized a future payer completes about 15 spins in that first day. So we stopped optimizing for payers and started optimizing for that ‘15 spins’ event.”

The logic is simple but powerful: in a world where data disappears, you optimize for the last reliable signal you can track. “We know a huge percentage of users who perform that action will eventually become payers,” he concludes. “We can only get this by learning from early behavior, because everything else—everything that happens after 24 hours—goes dark.”

Walled garden woes: Focusing on proxies isn't just about better targeting; it's also a defense against the systemic waste baked into the digital advertising ecosystem. Fernandez points to two massive, unsolved problems: rampant ad fraud that outpaces our defenses, and the inability to de-duplicate audiences across the industry's walled gardens. "Google doesn't talk to Facebook, and Facebook doesn't talk to TikTok," he says. "We waste a lot of budget going after the same users, and there's no single tool or solution that will clean this up." It's a reality that creates a deep divide, he notes, acknowledging that while enterprises like his have the resources to adapt, "if you're in a startup, you're in a huge struggle."