Attribution Explained

Peel relies on Shopify’s handling of first and last visits to access Referrer and UTM data. Peel is collecting customer attribution data from Shopify. We gather the first and last visits for the first order of a customer from Shopify.

We look at customers' first ever visit to the site - "First Touch".
We look at the latest visit the customer makes before the purchase - "Last Touch".

Shopify shares with us what they call CustomerJourney and it details referrals and UTM parameters. We defined our own Channel mapping with 13 platforms so you can get the most accurate tracking of channel performance, without needing to set up the channel mapping yourself as required in Google Analytics or other data platforms.

Channel Definitions

Direct
source = 'direct'
Facebook
source = 'Facebook'
source contains 'facebook.com'
Instagram
source = 'Instagram'
Pinterest
source = 'Pinterest'
Youtube
source contains 'youtube.com'
Twitter
source = 't.co'
Referral
medium = 'referral'
Organic Search
source = 'Google'
source = 'Bing'
source = 'Yahoo'
source = 'DuckDuckGo'
source contains 'bing.com'
source_type = 'SEO' or source contains 'duckduckgo.com'
Paid Search
source = 'Google'
source contains 'googleadservices.com' or 'googlesyndication.com'
source = 'Bing'
source = 'Yahoo'
source contains 'bing.com'
source_type ≠ 'SEO' or medium matches regex ^(cpc|ppc|paidsearch)$
Email
source = 'email'
Affiliate
source_type = 'AFFILIATE**'
OR medium = 'affiliate'
Online Advertising
medium matches regex ^(cpv|cpa|cpp|content-text|display|cpm|banner)$
Other / Unknown
Everything else

For Example:
Let's say you have gone on a couple of websites in the past few weeks, and then today you see an Instagram ad that mentions a product (due to retargeting) and then you click and purchase. That retargeting is going to be the last touch. When you click on it and buy, the buyer is going to attribute a part of your purchase to that Instagram ad since it was the last touch and then a part to the first time you saw it which could have been from search.

If it is “Other” it means we/Shopify doesn’t know where it came from.

For example, every time you send a link to someone and you remove the UTMS and they click on it from a text message, it will be "other" because there is no way to tell where it comes from. A mystery in the attribution world.

Referral

Referral is the domain.

Campaign

Campaign looks at the UTM tracking that was set up on the Ad to attribute to it, so you can have visibility by campaign.

You can answer the following questions + more with this attribution segmentation:

What campaign drew in the most revenue? Was it worth the investment?

Are customers that found us through Facebook worth more than those from Google or affiliates? ==>

LTV by Attribution Channel
AOV by Attribution Channel
ROAS by Attribution Channel

If I spent $100K in ads last month, am I making that back in revenue from new customers? ==>

New Sales by campaign or channel
New Subscription revenue by campaign or channel
New transaction revenue by campaign or channel

Attribution can be tricky. Some attribution analytics products build a model of attributing % of the revenue to each in that case, like 40% Facebook, 40% Klayvio and 20% Google. That’s what people call an attribution model and assumptions are made based on the traffic. Peel, at this point in time, takes a much more simple basic approach. Peel attributes all the revenue of the users based on the first order.

For example in this scenario. A customer:

Campaign 1

Sees a Facebook Ad and click
Seeds a Google Ad and click
Signs up but doesn’t buy
Get an email
User 1 Buys Order 1

Campaign 2

Sees a Google Ad and click
User 1 Buys Order 2

Peel will then attribute both Order 1 and Order 2 to Facebook

It's a simple way to look at attribution. Everyone looks at different versions of attribution - Peel's takes one look at it, First Touch or Last Touch.

We will be working on making upgrades to our attribution feature soon & adding models!