Our Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) model provides a comprehensive view of how various marketing efforts contribute to customer purchases. By unifying data from multiple sources of first party data you already own, we construct detailed purchase journeys that help you understand the impact of different marketing channels, landing pages, and ad creatives.
We standardize and unify funnel event streams from these sources into a single schema. By organizing events into purchase journeys and assessing their quality, we create a comprehensive dataset:
Highest Quality Journeys: We select the best purchase journey from each data source, referred to as the “Source System”.
Quality Assessment: The quality of a purchase journey is judged by the number of valid touch points it contains.
A touch point is considered valid if it contains at least one of the following:
Valid Landing Page: Any URL that is not a checkout or order confirmation page.
Valid Ad Creative ID: A numerical ID with at least four digits, extracted from URL parameters.
Mappable Marketing Channel: A marketing channel that can be identified through our channel mapping logic.
We do not consider Google branded campaigns as valid marketing channels for attribution purposes. Currently, the UTM values must contain “google” and “brand” in order for it to be considered branded search. In the future, we’ll connect to the actual underlying ad unit to better identify branded searches.
We currently will associate a touch point with a purchase with a max of 120 days lookback window. In other words, the preceding touch point must happen less than 120 days from the purchase.
We assess the complexity of a purchase journey by counting the distinct values within each dimension, which is not necessarily equivalent to the number of touch points:
Example: A customer visits the same landing page 3 separate times on 3 separate dates before making a purchase. This purchase journey contains 3 landing page touch points, but only 1 Distinct Dimension Value for the landing page model dimension, as the landing pages were not unique.
In our default reporting template, you can set a minimum number of distinct values required for a journey to be included in MTA analysis. By default, this is set to 2.
We have a default channel mapping logic that assigns marketing channels based on UTM parameters, referrer domains, and other common URL parameters. This logic is defined in our sm_event_marketing_channel_grouping macro and will be customizable in future releases.Our model automatically classifies traffic into the following channels:Paid Channels
Meta: Facebook and Instagram, identified through UTM sources like facebook, fb, and referrer domains.
Google Ads:
Non-Brand Search: Campaigns not containing branded terms.
Brand Search: Campaigns containing branded terms but are not considered for attribution.
TikTok
Snapchat
X Ads (Twitter)
Pinterest
AppLovin
Owned Channels
Email: Identified via UTM sources/mediums like email, klaviyo, and referrer domains.
SMS
Push Notifications
Direct Mail
Shop App
Earned/Other Channels
Affiliate
Influencer
Loyalty Program
Organic Search: Traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo.
Organic Social
Press/Media Coverage
Blog
Customer Service
QR Code Scans
Marketplace
Channel Mapping Examples
Email:
UTM Source/Medium contains patterns like email, klaviyo.
The above is a simplified overview. Our channel mapping system automatically classifies traffic sources using UTM parameters and referrer information. Below is the current hierarchy of channel attribution rules.Channel Mapping Rules (in order of precedence)
We now track how long it takes customers to make a purchase after their first interaction with different marketing touchpoints. This helps understand the customer journey and conversion timeline across three key dimensions:
Marketing Channels (e.g., Meta, Google, TikTok)
Ad Creatives
Landing Pages
Key Concepts
Only calculated for successful purchases
Maximum tracking window of 120 days
Measures days between first valid touch and purchase
Independent tracking for each dimension
Automatically handles missing or invalid touchpoints
Business Value
This data helps answer questions like:
How long does it typically take for Facebook ads to drive purchases?
Do certain landing pages lead to faster or slower conversions than others?
Which marketing channels have the shortest time to purchase?
Limitations
Only tracks first touch to purchase (not intermediate touchpoints)
Requires at least one valid touch in the dimension being measured