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Attribution: how you’re attributing purchases back to the original source of the user’s traffic.
Do you see that a lot of your traffic is coming from Direct or Referral? There may be issues with how Google Analytics is set up on your website. There’s likely also issues with how your visitor cookies are being stored.
Traditionally this was done on the last-click model which only attributed the user’s conversion to the last-clicked medium and source.
A shopper’s journey to making a purchase very likely consists of multiple sessions. The last session would therefore be where the conversion gets its attribution from. This would likely be very misleading. Luckily this issue likely only exists on your reports and Google Ads, if you enable automated bidding, likely knows the best attribution to use (Data-driven Model).
The issue your team will have is not knowing accurately what channels are contributing to most of your sales. This can’t be overlooked since many budgeting decisions will likely be made from these channel reports.
Luckily there are a few fixes, some very easy to implement and some more complex.
- One easy fix is to make sure you’ve installed Google Analytics tracking code on every single page and that you’ve enabled cross-domain tracking for self-referring domains outside of your main directory.
- One step up will be making sure you create Custom Channel Groupings for any traffic that is incorrectly attributed to your Referral channel (such as Facebook.com or an email provider).
- Setup cross-domain tracking for your payment portal to avoid self-referrals.
- Setup Google Analytics 4 and take advantage of the User Acquisition reports in contrast to the Session Acquisition reports.
- Setup your own custom cookie which can be used for more consistent reporting. This is particularly useful if you’re facing issues with mobile browsers and a large portion of misallocated Direct or Referral traffic.
Need any help with these? Schedule a free 15-minute call with one of our Analytics specialists.
James B. Lindsay
James is currently a Digital Director at Master Concept where he directs a team dedicated to providing digital analytics solutions and training for enterprises across Asia. He believes the most significant impact on the success of a business is the amount of quality information that they have access to and are able to act on in their daily operations. Previously, James launched and ran his own startup company, Yumr, which specialized in restaurant discovery based on diets and specific dishes. He also held operational roles in innovation labs in Hong Kong and Germany. In his spare time James enjoys studying ancient history and accidentally getting sunburnt. Recent favourite quote: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” - Richard Feynman
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