You probably have a drawer — or a box — at home where you put things that don’t quite belong anywhere else. This junk drawer isn’t a failure of your organizing skills, but a natural outcome of our ability to categorize things. That’s because things seldom fall into a small, finite number of hard categories but instead follow a long tail of smaller and smaller categories. So we choose a small number of the largest categories — pots, silverware, glasses, mugs, spatulas … and dedicate space to them — and everything else goes in the junk drawer.
The un-categorized category is called the residual category. Yes, it is a category, but we acknowledge that it is a category of the uncategorizable, which is in itself a kind of paradox!
In our marketing work, we may know this residual category as (direct)/(none), “Unassigned,” or (not set). In market research, it becomes that segment that just doesn’t fit, but we can’t describe, or the dreaded “Outliers.”
And all this is fine, and a natural, practical response to the long tail. But what happens when that category grows? If it represents 30% of our customers, can we really ignore it? What happens when a third of what we own is in the junk drawer?
Let’s take the case of the (direct)/(none) — analytics-speak for the group of people who just arrived at your platform with no provenance data. This is a growing and perplexing group. It used to be assumed that this was just people typing your address in directly, but no more. Nowadays, it is likely to be an artifact of privacy settings, modern browsers, or even from AI Agents visiting on someone’s behalf. These are your marketing ‘nones.’
Who is none, anyway?
To better understand how we handle the growing group of nones, we can turn to a parallel case in the social sciences, where the catch-all group has grown to be the largest category.
For many years, researchers have been following US religious affiliations and beliefs — most notably Pew Research, which, in their 2024 report “Religious ‘Nones’ in America,” stated that 28% of people now check none as their affiliation. This compares to 16% back in 2007.
The fascinating thing about this group is how diverse and surprising it is. It isn’t just a homogeneous group of the ungodly, as some might assume. The percentage of true atheists in here is small — just 17% (so less than 5% of the population) — the rest choose non-affiliation for a variety of different reasons. Lumping them together as a ‘none group’ misses the true insight into the group’s growth. That’s why Pew and others have worked to better understand the makeup of the nones and to better categorize them.
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Pew did this by deeper, more nuanced research, going beyond the standard affiliation question and cross-referencing with other behavioral and attitudinal data. That let them discover some surprising things, such as the fact that 69% believed in God or some other higher power. Certainly not the picture that the simple none designation might have you believe.
Can we apply a similar approach to our nones? Yes.
How did they get here?
Start by hypothesizing what might be driving the category and why it is growing. Here are some of the ways that a customer might appear there:
- The Refuser: The active, conscious user who has made a deliberate choice to minimize tracking and visibility
- The Delegator: The person who outsourced the steps towards you, whether through agents, aggregators, AI search or communities
- The Defaulter: Someone who just accepted defaults in modern browsers or systems and became invisible
- The Typer: The person who just typed in your URL in a clean browser.
These four groups are vastly different, both in intent and in how we might reach them. Much industry discussion has moved from assuming that everyone in this group is a Typer to focusing on the Refuser.
However, the bulk of your nones will likely fall in either Defaulters (probably the largest group for most businesses) or the Delegators. While Defaulters are driven by changes in policy from tool providers (such as browsers), the growth in Delegators is a function of new technologies, such as AI. As we see new types of intermediaries — especially agents — grow in usage, we will need to find better ways to size and understand this group. Ignoring this group could be a huge mistake.
The takeaway
So what can you do to better get to know your nones? Here are some general steps to drive better understanding and growth:
- Ask, “What is the residual category in my pipeline?” — Is it growing? Is it explainable?
- Stop treating the residual group as noise or a blind spot. Do the work to identify what it is made up of.
- When you’ve identified its components, build an attribution model. Find ways to size or discriminate between the subtypes. Maybe you need MMM or other research to identify what is really going on.
- Monitor growth in key groups, especially those driven by new technologies or behaviors.
It is imperative that we continually revisit our categorizations, especially when it comes to the residual category. Ignoring this group, especially as it grows, will mean lost opportunities and missed market movements.
It should come as no surprise if new technologies mean you have to rethink your customers. Sometimes — as in the case of (direct)/(none) — you may need to get insight from other attribution methods, or review the tools being used. Whatever you do, you will need to understand that the nones are a real group of real customers — and understanding them may be critical to your business.
