Signals
Traffic, social numbers, search rankings, AI answers and what people say — on one live board, with a question box over the top.
Signals is the board a marketing analyst would otherwise assemble from six tools every Monday: who's reading right now, what your site is doing, how your posts performed, where you rank, whether AI answers name you, and what people are actually saying.
It's also where you ask questions, rather than reading dashboards until one answers you.
The board
A live map of where people are reading opens the page, then a widget per kind of signal:
- Your site — sessions, top pages and the referrer mix, including visits sent by AI answer engines.
- Social — reach and engagement per network, per voice.
- Search — the queries you show up for and your position on each.
- AI answers — how often you're named for the questions your buyers ask, and whose site gets cited.
- ballad.to — clicks on your link-in-bio page.
- What people say — the themes distilled from replies, comments and interviews.
Click any widget for the detail behind it. Recent conversions link straight through to the person in People.
Where each number comes from
| Signal | How it arrives |
|---|---|
| Visits, conversions | The beacon on your own site, first-party |
| X numbers | Read from X every six hours, including posts you put up by hand |
| Other networks | Ballad asks you two days after a post goes live; what you type feeds the plan |
| Search | Your own Search Console, pulled daily |
| AI answers | Ballad asks answer engines your tracked questions weekly and records who's named |
| Themes | Replies, pasted comments, thread comments and customer interviews, distilled daily |
Sampling matters for the AI numbers: they're rates and trends, never a precise rank, and Ballad says so rather than inventing precision.
Ask Ballad
Press ⌘K — Ctrl-K on Windows — from Signals or Loop and ask in plain English. "Which post brought this week's signups?" comes back as a short answer drawn only from your own data, with every claim linked to the post, the person or the plan change it came from.
It can also draft: ask for a post about the thing that's working and it writes one into your Inbox. It can't publish, approve, or change the plan.
What the loop does with it
Signals isn't a read-only report. Everything on this board is what the analyst reads each week: it becomes what Ballad believes about your market, the experiments it runs, and the plan changes it proposes in Loop.
A gap in the AI answers becomes an experiment with one click. An article that slips in search becomes a refresh in your Inbox. A theme people keep raising becomes the question your next article opens with.
Next
- Loop — what Ballad does about all this.
- People — the named version of the same arrivals.
- Measure what your content does — installing the beacon.