Welcome to Attribuly!
We are excited to share how Attribuly works to ensure you have the correct configuration right from the start. Attribution is our core functionality, designed to solve the most critical need for DTC brands: Traffic Source Analysis .
1. How We Collect Customer Events
We use advanced tracking methods to build a comprehensive view of your customer's behavior.
- Automatic Installation: When you install Attribuly, we automatically place a first-party cookie in your store. This allows us to collect the majority of essential customer events immediately.
- Shopify Plus Features: If you are a Shopify Plus merchant, we offer enhanced tracking that includes checkout page events, such as "Checkout Start" "Address Info Submitted", "Contact Info Submitted", "Payment Info Submitted", "Shipping Info Submitted".
- Complete the Journey (Action Required): To capture Email Subscribe events and ensure you have a complete customer journey view, please enable App Embed in your theme settings.
- Third-Party Landing Pages: If you utilize third-party landing pages, please contact our support team to obtain the Attribuly tracking pixel for manual installation.
2. How We Track Traffic Sources
We identify and categorize your store's traffic based on Channel Groups , which relies heavily on accurate UTM tagging.
- UTM Templates: Our system uses UTM templates to recognize where traffic comes from.
- Note: Missing or incorrect UTM templates may result in traffic being misclassified (often leading to a high volume of "Direct" traffic).
- Marketing Channel Integration: Please ensure you integrate your marketing channels within the Sources settings.
- Auto-Tracking (Recommended): For advertising platforms that support it—including Google, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), TikTok, and Bing —please enable Auto-tracking . This ensures the most accurate data collection without manual tagging errors.
- For marketing channels that are not integrated, you can still see the attribution by adding UTM parameters such as utm_source and utm_medium to the destination URL and then selecting these dimensions.
3. How We Calculate ROI and Profit
Attribuly goes beyond basic metrics to give you the true financial health of your campaigns.
- Connecting Ad Spend: We rely on the ad.id parameter carried in ad clicks to associate a user's session with specific ad campaigns and their corresponding costs. This is essential for calculating ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
- Important: If the ad.id is missing from the ad URL, cost statistics may be inaccurate. You must either enable Auto-tracking (which adds this automatically) or manually add the parameters as detailed in each integration's instruction page.
- Profit & LTV: The most vital operational metrics for a DTC brand are Profit and LTV (Lifetime Value) —insights that are not available in standard Ads Managers.
- Action Required: To calculate the Profit and LTV for every campaign, you must import your COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) , shipping costs, and other relevant expense data into Attribuly.
4. What You Will Achieve
Once you complete these configurations, you will unlock:
1. A complete customer journey visualization for every single order.
2. A unified reporting center that acts as a single source of truth for your entire team.
3. Upgraded insights focusing on Profit and LTV , allowing you to optimize and elevate your media buying strategies.
FAQ: Why do I see a lot of traffic from "Direct"?
If you see a high volume of "Direct" traffic, it typically means the traffic source could not be identified. This usually happens when:
- UTM templates are missing: The URL did not have the tracking parameters we need to classify it.
- Auto-tracking is off: Ensure Auto-tracking is enabled for your ad platforms so the system can automatically recognize the source.
- Cookies have been cleared
While Direct traffic cannot be cleared, using Full Impact's AI model can reduce Direct traffic by 90%