You’re missing these metrics
💪Your pop-up has three metrics. you've been optimizing one, and more!
Hello! You've arrived at What Actually Works 🤓
We break down the real strategies, decisions, and plays that actually move the needle in your marketing, and here it for today.
Partnership with AirOps
AI search doesn't wait for teams still figuring out prompts.
The shift from traditional search to AI search happened fast. What didn't follow was execution. Most teams are still figuring out the workflow while their AI search visibility slips.
On June 11, SEO leaders from Chime, Bitly, and Udemy are showing exactly how they use Quill to move past one-off prompts into agentic Playbooks that execute and scale without manual intervention.
You'll walk away with:
- What to say to leadership to get AI initiatives approved fast
- What's working in AI search right now, straight from teams doing it at scale
- Where to start with agentic Playbooks and what to prioritize first
Tyler Roehmholdt (Director of SEO Strategy, Bitly), Nicholas King (Sr. SEO and Digital Experience Manager, Udemy), and Bridget Nelson (AI Search Strategist, Chime) are walking through what they've built and what's moving the needle right now.
One session. A system you can start building the same week.
Can't make it live? Register anyway and get the recording in your inbox within 24 hours.
💪 You’re missing these metrics
The standard pop-up workflow goes like this. Opt-in rate looks low. The team tests a new offer, rewrites the headline, adjusts the design. The number moves slightly. The conclusion: pop-ups are saturated.
The actual problem is that low conversion rate is not a diagnosis. It is a symptom that could mean three completely different things. And if you are managing this across multiple properties, the wrong diagnosis compounds across every one of them simultaneously.
Three Metrics. Three Different Fires.
① Views: low here means a targeting or trigger problem. The creative is irrelevant until this is solved.
② Opt-in rate: low here, with healthy views, is an offer, design, or copy problem. This is the only layer most teams ever diagnose.
③ Downstream conversion: low here means subscriber quality problem. The list is growing. The revenue is not following.
Each number has a different fix and a completely different timeline. Treating all three as one metric is how teams spend months optimizing copy on a pop-up that is not even showing to the right traffic.
The Silent Failure Nobody Checks
The most common invisible failure is a pop-up that has accumulated so many targeting rules and exclusions that the rules overlap, cancel each other out, and quietly filter out the majority of traffic the team assumes it is reaching.
Technically active. Practically invisible.
Pull the view count from the last 30 days and compare against qualified sessions. Views below 20-25% of qualified traffic means the rule stack is the problem. Audit every rule against every other rule, find the overlaps, and rebuild from scratch with explicit logic at each layer.
Thirty minutes per account. Run it across every property before touching a single headline.
The Three Numbers That Expose Real List Health
A pop-up generating high opt-in volume from weak-intent traffic looks healthy until the email dashboard catches up six weeks later.
30-day open rate of new subscribers. 30-day click rate. 60-day first-purchase conversion.
A pop-up optimized purely for volume fills the list with addresses that cost money to mail and do not pay back. If that list belongs to someone else, the underperformance is yours to explain before they ask.
The opt-in rate was always one of three metrics. The other two have been running unsupervised the entire time.
🐥 Tweet Worth Saving
Partnership with MasterClass
This is what your calls should actually look like. Most people never find out
You're already good at this. But good means nothing when the person next to you is getting sharper after every call, and you're still guessing.
On Call gives you three things no one else at work will:
- Live guidance mid-call so you always know your next move
- A clear read on your blind spots so you stop carrying the same gaps into every room
- A running track of your growth so excellence stops being a feeling
The gap between good and great isn't talent. It's feedback. Start your first coached call free on Mac today.
Every call you take without this is a call you can't learn from.
💃Events
🔥 Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder of SparkToro, Is Revealing How AI Forms Brand Opinions From Signals Most Marketers Never Controlled
June 9 | Virtual Event | Free
AI already has an opinion about your brand, and you didn't write it. Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder of SparkToro, and Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search at Wix, show you exactly which signals shape it and how to own them across 30 sessions zero vendor pitches. Can't make it live? Every session lands in your inbox.
✅ Reserve Your Free Spot
Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.
🔥 Most Influencer Audits Happen After a Bad Launch. This Session Teaches You to Run One Before.
June 11 | Virtual Event | Free
Waiting for numbers to come back empty is the most expensive way to learn your roster was wrong. Cadence Melendez from Moroccanoil and Brooks Miller, EVP of Creator Marketing at Edelman, walk through exactly how brand-side teams pressure-test a roster before it goes live.
✅ Reserve Your Free Spot
Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.
Thanks for being part of the WAW team 💃 We’d love to know if this was helpful so we can continue playing it smart with the right strategies.