The organic-versus-paid credit war is still quietly draining growth budgets across the industry, and almost nobody names it as the line item it actually is.
I was reminded of it reading a recent post from Simon Thillay on how the latest Apple and Google store-transparency data is reshaping ASO. He makes several sharp points, but one deserves to be shouted from the rooftops: as user journeys get more intertwined, arguing over who deserves credit actively degrades the acquisition experience. In his words, it’s past time to unite organic and paid, ASO, SEO and GEO, and bridge the marketing divides under a single banner. (Worth reading his full post, linked at the bottom.) Appdna
I’ve been preaching holistic marketing for over 15 years, and I still watch growth teams paralyze themselves over exactly this.
The questions that eat entire quarters
You know the ones:
“Is this conversion from paid search or organic?”
“Did performance lift because of the ad campaign, or brand word-of-mouth?”
“We tested nine ad variations across three platforms, so which color palette gets credit for this organic conversion?”
Every hour spent litigating those questions is an hour not spent improving the funnel. And the deeper cost isn’t the time, it’s what the obsession does to the work. Teams optimizing for attribution reports start making decisions that look good in the report and bad in reality: clashing messaging across surfaces, chasing different intent types in different channels, fragmenting the brand, and quietly ignoring the only thing that actually matters, whether the user found something valuable.
When you optimize for channel silos, you end up optimizing for attribution reports instead of actual revenue.
Why the silos are collapsing anyway
Here’s what makes this urgent rather than philosophical: the platforms are dissolving the paid/organic divide for you, whether you’re ready or not.
The evidence is everywhere in the current store data. Apple’s Custom Product Pages, once a purely paid tool, now surface in organic search results. Paid bid data has become some of the cheapest organic keyword research available, and strong organic rankings quietly lower your paid Search Ads costs. Search still drives the majority of app discovery, roughly two-thirds on the App Store and well over half on Google Play, but the winners are pulling further ahead, and post-install engagement now feeds back into organic visibility.
In other words, paid and organic aren’t two channels anymore. They’re two views of one system. A team still treating them as separate fiefdoms is fighting the platform’s own direction of travel.
What happens when you commit to one system
When you step back and treat the funnel as a single connected ecosystem instead of a set of competing channels, three things change:
- Overall performance lifts. Not one channel’s dashboard, the actual blended result, because the surfaces reinforce each other instead of contradicting.
- Board and team narratives get cleaner. You stop explaining away attribution noise and start telling one coherent growth story.
- The “who gets credit” debate stops being the focus, and, almost overnight, teams that were fighting can collaborate.
That last one is the quiet unlock. The credit war isn’t just wasteful; it’s actively adversarial. Remove it, and the same people who were defending their turf start building on each other’s work.
The mindset that has to die
Blended UA thinking needs to kill the channel-silo mindset once and for all. Not because silos are philosophically ugly, but because the data is murkier than it used to be and getting murkier. Familiar metrics are being deprecated as funnels change. The teams that win won’t be the ones with perfect attribution, that’s gone. They’ll be the ones comfortable acting on the best available signal, across one unified system, without sacrificing the chase for meaningful metrics.
Stop asking which channel deserves the credit. Start asking whether the whole system is pulling in one direction. That’s the only question that pays.
Inspired by Simon Thillay’s post on what the latest store transparency reports mean for ASO. Read the original for his full take.