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Revenue attribution

Use Revenue attribution to track how many campaign clicks convert into revenue.

Written by Gareth Burroughes
Updated this week

Revenue attribution shows which campaign clicks lead to purchases and how much revenue they generate.

You can track campaign revenue using two methods: Direct tracking and Advanced revenue attribution.

  • Direct tracking only detects revenue from email campaigns.

  • Advanced revenue attribution tracks revenue from email, SMS, and MMS, and can attribute both direct and assisted revenue across the customer journey.


Before you start

Things you need to know:

  • The assisted revenue attribution model is only available for customers on certain account packages. To discuss, contact your Customer Success representative.

  • To use Direct tracking, you must install the ROI tracking scripts on your site.

  • To use Advanced revenue attribution, you must sync your order data using one of our ecommerce integrations, using our API or using an SFTP client.

  • Required permissions
    ​To use this feature, you must have the following user permissions:


Direct tracking

Direct tracking attributes revenue for email clicks within a 1-hour window before a purchase. This window is fixed.

This method requires the installation of the ROI tracking script on your store and uses the CheckoutAmount passed into Dotdigital through this script.

This method doesn't support multiple currencies and assumes that any tracked amount has been converted into the store's base currency at checkout.

To set Revenue attribution to use Direct tracking:

  1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > Commerce > Commerce settings.

  2. Under the heading Revenue attribution, select Direct tracking.

  3. Select SAVE at the bottom of the page.


Advanced revenue attribution

Advanced revenue attribution infers revenue for email, SMS, and MMS campaign clicks that lead to a purchase within a defined conversion window.

To use Advanced revenue attribution, you must sync order data from your store. Without the Advanced revenue attribution setting enabled, imported order data cannot contribute to accurate campaign revenue tracking.

To set Revenue attribution to use Advanced revenue attribution:

  1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > Commerce > Commerce settings.

  2. Under the heading Revenue attribution, select Advanced revenue attribution.

  3. For Conversion window, choose a unit of time.

  4. Enter the Conversion window time.

  5. Select SAVE at the bottom of the page.

How long should I set my conversion window?

Shorter windows

Use shorter conversion windows if you send campaigns frequently or have a short sales cycle. This helps you get more accurate insights into which campaigns contributed to the final conversion.

Longer windows

If you send campaigns at a lower frequency, or if your sales cycles are traditionally longer, we recommend using longer conversion window times. This ensures earlier campaign clicks that contributed to the purchase are included in the insight.

Direct and assisted campaign revenue

When you use the Advanced revenue attribution method, revenue is attributed to your campaigns in two ways:

Type

Description

Direct campaign revenue

When a customer makes a purchase, the total order amount is attributed to the last campaign clicked before the purchase.

Assisted campaign revenue

When a customer makes a purchase, we attribute a proportional amount of the order total to any campaign which received a click within the conversion window.

A campaign can therefore display both direct and assisted revenue.

Example

You have Advanced revenue attribution set up on your account with a conversion window of 5 days. You send Campaign 1 to a contact, and they click through to a product page on your store, but take no further action.

Two days later, you send Campaign 2 to the contact, and they again click through to the product, and this time, add the product to their cart. However, they then abandon their browsing session without completing the purchase.

After one more day, you send abandoned cart Campaign 3 to the contact. They click through to their cart and complete the purchase, for an order total of £100. Success!

Because the purchase was completed following a click-through from Campaign 3, this campaign is attributed £100 in direct campaign revenue. Then, because the customer also clicked on Campaign 1 and Campaign 2 during the conversion window, each of these campaigns receives £50 in assisted campaign revenue.

This assisted revenue figure helps to demonstrate the importance of your email, SMS, and MMS campaigns in the customer journey, even when purchases are not made immediately or directly from a click-through.


View revenue

To view the revenue from the Campaign reports area:

  1. Go to Analytics > Reports.

  2. You see email campaign reports by default. To view SMS or MMS campaign reports, expand the MORE REPORTS drop-down menu and select SMS/MMS.

  3. Select Display to open the Table display settings.

  4. Select the Revenue checkbox to display the direct revenue attributed to each campaign.

  5. Select the Assisted revenue checkbox to display the assisted revenue attributed to each campaign.

  6. Select the Conversion rate checkbox to display in percentage terms the number of orders divided by the number of delivered campaigns.

You can also open a campaign report directly and view the total tracked direct revenue and conversion rate for a campaign in the top right.

You can also open a campaign report directly to view the total tracked direct revenue in a headline tile. For email campaign reports, conversion rate is also displayed.

If a campaign has no direct revenue attributed to it but does have assisted revenue, the tile displays this figure instead.

Seeing different numbers in Google Analytics?
Learn why Dotdigital and Google Analytics might report different figures.

Multicurrency support

Revenue is always calculated and displayed in your account’s base currency. If some of your customers’ orders were placed in their local currencies, we automatically convert the amount using the exchange rate of the day of the purchase.

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