Order attribution in Ometria

In ecommerce marketing, attribution is the process by which revenue from an order is attributed to the marketing action(s) which led to the sale occurring.

A contact might interact with lots of channels before making an order in your online store, e.g. organic search, email, social media advertising, referrals etc.

This article explains how to see and understand your attribution statistics in Ometria, as well as how Ometria attributes orders.

For more details, see: Ometria attribution logic explained 

Viewing attribution in Ometria

Automation attribution

From the Overview dashboard, scroll down to Automation campaigns performance and check:

• Revenue from email - Total value of orders attributed to automation campaign emails.
• Revenue per email - Average revenue per email generated from automation campaign emails.

You can see these same metrics in Campaign Performance > Automation campaigns

Select your preferred dates and ‘Time unit’, then the following columns:

• Revenue per email
• Total revenue

from the Overview report at the top of the screen, and the list at the bottom:

To see order attribution for an individual campaign select your campaign from the list.

Revenue per email and Total revenue display in the metrics:

You can also select the Orders tab to see all your orders attributed to this campaign:

Broadcast attribution

Go to Campaign Performance > Broadcast campaigns and select your preferred dates.

Your total revenue from broadcast campaigns sent within your chosen date range appears at the end of the broadcast funnel:

You can also check your revenue attributed per device and and per lifecycle status.  

In the Campaign list at the bottom of the screen, select the columns:

• Orders
• Total revenue

to see your order attribution per campaign.

To see order attribution for an individual broadcast campaign select your campaign from the list.

Orders, Total revenue and Revenue per email all relate to order attribution.

Attribution in the orders report

Go to Reports > Orders report 

In the Orders list tab, the following columns describe your order attribution:

Visits - ‘Not provided’ and ‘Not tracked’

The Visit medium, Visit campaign and Visit domain columns all rely on UTM parameters to report back information.

In some cases these parameters are missing, and you’ll see the status ‘Not provided’ or ‘Not tracked’.

Select the Orders grouped tab and group your orders by:

How Ometria attributes orders

Attribution in Ometria is based on last click - the last place a contact clicked (like a link in an email) before arriving at your site and placing an order.

If the last click was not from an Ometria campaign, we’ll check to see if they used a coupon code from an Ometria campaign, and if there was no coupon, then we’ll check if the contact clicked on an Ometria campaign within your specified time window.

The attribution priority is as follows:

1. Visit: When a contact places an order while visiting your site, having clicked on a link in an Ometria campaign.
2. Coupon code: When a contact places an order using a coupon code sent via an Ometria automation campaign within 31 days of receiving the coupon.
3. Time window: When a contact places an order after clicking through an Ometria campaign within your defined time window (default two hours).
4. When they visited your website from any other route.

Troubleshooting attribution

Do third party providers affect attribution?

Yes. Some third party providers strip out UTM parameters from visit URLs, meaning that Ometria cannot receive the information it needs to attribute an order.

These orders will display as ‘Not provided’ in the Orders report.

See Visits - ‘Not provided’ and ‘Not tracked’ for more information.

What happens if a payment page redirects?

Ometria still receives the order through your ecommerce data even if your payment page redirects at the point of checkout (e.g. to Paypal, Sage, Gumroad etc.)

Ometria uses the time window based or coupon code based attribution for these orders, to make sure the order is attributed to the original source.

However, it is possible that this order will be incorrectly attributed.

For example, if the contact is on your site, clicks ‘pay via PayPal’, then goes to paypal.com and comes back to your site, it is possible that the visit is attributed to paypal.com based on visit based attribution, as that's the last source of a visit.

This issue is more likely to occur in Google Analytics than in Ometria, but it can happen.

Discrepancies between Google Analytics and Ometria in reported campaign revenue and orders

It depends which attribution model you’re using in Google Analytics.

As it’s unusual that two different reporting sources have the same attribution logic, they often report different revenue, number of orders and visits.

Ometria has more information about your campaigns and your customers than Google Analytics does, and can make more detailed calculations.

Our data has shown that it’s common to expect 15-20% difference between the revenue reported by Google Analytics/other reporting software and Ometria.

When Ometria might report lower campaign revenue than Google Analytics

Possible reasons:

• JavaScript is not implemented correctly: JavaScript tracking on your website tracks your customers sessions and activity. If the JavaScript is not correctly implemented, it may cause discrepancies in the reporting statistics.
• A data integration error: Where some orders are not being sent through from your importer or API.
• The JavaScript is being called for orders that are not fully valid.
• Any recent changes on your website: For example the addition of pop-ups, footers, and new web pages which might not have the JavaScript tracker implemented correctly.

If you think any of the above might be the case, contact Support.

When Ometria might report higher campaign revenue than Google Analytics

There are several possible reasons for this:

UTM tracking parameters are not being populated across your website

UTM tags are Google Analytics (GA) tags added to links in the email. When a user clicks on a link, GA can identify that user as coming from a particular traffic source channel (Email) from a specific campaign (Ometria_Newsletter X).

If the UTM tags are not populated throughout the users journey on the website (e.g. tracking parameters are stripped off while reloading or navigating to another page) certain GA attribution models no longer attribute any transaction to that email.

As Ometria doesn’t use universal tracking parameters (UTMs) for tracking, Ometria will continue to track it.

Orders made through Paypal or third parties are not tracked by Google Analytics

If the payment page on your website redirects to Paypal or a third party payment page where the link tracking parameters are stripped off, then GA will not be able to track that transaction.

Ometria will continue to track that order as Ometria doesn’t use UTM parameters to track campaign revenue.

Google Analytics does not report on revenue made in Amazon or eBay stores or other offline channels

Ometria can report on these stores so a discrepancy in revenue should be expected between Google Analytics and Ometria in these cases.