Attribution

Open Growth › Attribution and choose a period with the button at the top (Last 30 days at first; tap it for another period, or pick days on its calendar). Days follow your store’s time zone.

Who gets the credit

An order can come from several visits. A shopper who allows Analytics in your cookie banner (in the United States, every shopper until they turn it off) is remembered for 30 days, so their order knows every visit of the 30 days before it. For everyone else, an order knows at most two visits: the one that started the cart, and another that placed the order a few days later, say from an email. Credit for a sale, beside the period, says who gets the sale:

• Last click, not direct: the last visit that came from a link, an ad or a search. This is the usual choice.
• Last click: the last visit before the order, also when the shopper simply typed your address.
• First click: the first visit that came from a link, an ad or a search.
• Any click: each of those visits gets all of it, so channels add up to more than the total. The totals at the top stay the real ones.
• Linear: shared equally between those visits, so a channel can show part of an order.

A visit that simply typed your address does not take the credit from one that came from somewhere, except under Last click. When no visit of the order came from anywhere, Direct gets it.

Under the menu, a line says how far credit looks back: how many of the period’s storefront orders were placed by shoppers who allowed analytics. Other orders keep the visits they knew.

Path to purchase

Choose Path to purchase beside the period to see how shoppers who allowed analytics came to buy:

• Orders with a history: how many of the period’s storefront orders kept their visits, and their share. Only those orders are in this view.
• Visits before an order and Time to purchase: the middle value, and a short table of orders and sales by the number of visits (1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6 or more) and by the time from the first visit to the order (within a day, then 1–3, 4–7, 8–14 and 15–30 days).
• Paths: the channels of the visits that came from a link, an ad or a search, in order, such as Email → Social ads, with their orders and sales. A channel met several times in a row counts once; an order whose visits all typed your address is Direct. The ten with the most sales show; All paths opens the rest.

What you see

• Sessions, Orders, Conversion (the share of sessions that placed a storefront order, so never more than 100 %, even when one visit placed several orders) and Sales for the period. Sales are orders not cancelled and not test orders, in your store’s currency, less the money refunds gave back in those days: the same sales as Analytics.
• Channels: Direct, Search, Search ads, Shopping listings, Shopping ads, Social, Social ads, AI assistants, Video, Email, Messaging apps, Other websites, Display ads, Affiliates, Other ads and Other campaigns, each with its sessions, orders, conversion and sales. Select a channel to see its sources: Google, Instagram, ChatGPT, WhatsApp, a newsletter’s name, or the address of a site that linked to you.
• Campaigns: the links you tagged with utm_campaign, with their source, medium and ad, the ones with the most sales first.
• Not recorded: visits from before your store recorded sources, and orders no visit brought (created in the admin, imported, subscription renewals, or placed from another browser than the visit’s).

Traffic above the channels shows All traffic, Marketing, Paid or Organic. Paid is your ads, display and affiliates. Organic is what you earned without paying, including email. Marketing is both, so it leaves out people who came straight to your store.

How a visit’s source is found

Storeloom reads three things on the first page of a visit:

1. The link’s utm tags: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content and utm_term. They come first.
2. An ad click’s id: Google Ads (gclid, gbraid, wbraid), Microsoft Ads (msclkid), TikTok (ttclid), X (twclid), LinkedIn (li_fat_id), Pinterest (epik), Snapchat (ScCid), Yandex (yclid), Meta (fbclid, which Facebook and Instagram add to every link that leaves them, ads or not) and Google Merchant Center’s free listings (srsltid).
3. The site or app that sent the visitor: only the site’s address (such as google.com), never the page they were on, or the app whose own browser opened the link (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and others).

Nothing else in the address is kept. For shoppers who did not allow analytics no cookie is needed: an order is matched to its visit by the same daily visitor code Analytics counts visitors with, within a day and from the same browser. For shoppers who allowed it, the store’s own cookie holds a random number, and their visits are kept with it for 30 days. Each of your store’s addresses has its own cookie, so a shopper who moves between your domains, browsers or devices counts as a different visitor on each.

A page opened through a tagged link (utm tags or an ad’s click id) starts that link’s own session, even while the visitor is in the middle of another visit, so a campaign’s visitors are never counted as the visit before them. The next pages of that visit, without tags, stay in it.

Messages, WhatsApp and email. Links opened from Messages, WhatsApp on iPhone, Telegram and most email apps do not say where they came from, so they count as Direct unless the link carries utm tags. On Android, apps such as WhatsApp, Gmail and Telegram name themselves and are recognised. Tag the links you share, for example https://your-store.com/?utm_source=whatsapp&utm_medium=messaging&utm_campaign=spring.

Meta ads. In Ads Manager, add URL parameters to your ads, for example utm_source={{site_source_name}}&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign={{campaign.id}}&utm_content={{ad.id}}&utm_term={{adset.id}}. Storeloom shows Facebook, Instagram or Messenger by name and lists each campaign with its ad set and ad.

Google Merchant Center. With auto-tagging on (Merchant Center, conversion settings), clicks on your free listings bring srsltid and show as Shopping listings. Google Ads clicks bring gclid and show as Search ads, or Shopping ads when the campaign’s name says Shopping. Your pages accept these tags and tell search engines their address without them.

Each order

An order placed in your store shows Came from on its page: the source and channel, then the medium, campaign, ad set or keyword, ad, the site that referred the visitor and the page they landed on. All sources opens this page. When the shopper allowed analytics, Visits before this order lists their visits of the 30 days before it: the newest five on the card, every one behind the button under them.

If the shopper later takes Analytics back in Cookie settings, or you erase them as a customer, their visits are forgotten, and their orders keep only the visit that brought each.

With Meta, TikTok or Pinterest connected

For visitors who allow Marketing in your cookie banner, your store also keeps each ad’s click id in its own cookies and sends it with every event, so the ad platform can tie purchases to its ads: Meta’s click id (made from fbclid) and a browser id for 90 days, to Meta’s Conversions API; TikTok’s ttclid for 30 days, to TikTok’s Events API; Pinterest’s epik for 30 days, to Pinterest’s Conversions API. Each service gets only its own. Declining removes them.

Analytics shows the channels too, under Where visitors came from, with All sources leading here.