Sales attribution & channels

Every marketing-consented storefront session and every eligible online order feeds one built-in attribution engine. It records the touches a buyer hit on the way to checkout — a tracked email click, a UTM-tagged ad, a short link, a QR scan, a referring site — and credits the resulting sale to a channel under an attribution model you choose. The report lives on the Attribution tab under Marketing; this page explains how the crediting works and how to read every number on it.

For the hub view of the whole workspace, see Marketing & automation. For building the campaigns and links that generate these touches, see Campaigns.

How tracking works

Attribution is tracked first-party, on your own store domain — no third-party cookies and no external pixel are involved. Four kinds of signal become touchpoints:

• Storefront sessions. Every visit to your online store starts or continues a session. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight UTC, so one shopper can create several sessions.
• UTM parameters. A visit arriving with utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, and friends is classified into a channel from those tags. Sellerlane tags its own email links automatically — see UTM tracking defaults.
• Tracked email clicks. Clicks inside your campaign and automation emails are recorded as touches and tied to the exact send that earned them.
• Shareable short links and QR codes. A campaign’s shareable link — the full UTM-tagged URL, its short /m/<code> redirect, or the QR code — carries its campaign identity into the session it opens. The redirect click alone is not a storefront session; the linked landing visit must pass the same consent and traffic-quality gates before it can receive session or order credit.

When an order is placed, the engine looks back through the buyer’s touchpoints inside the attribution window and credits the order according to the selected model. Tracking respects buyer consent: sessions from visitors who decline tracking carry no touch history, so their orders land in Unattributed.

Note

Attribution only reaches orders that can be tied to a session or customer identity. The Channels header shows order attribution coverage — the share of in-range orders that carry at least one identity. Orders without one can’t be linked to a channel, which is why attributed orders can undercount total orders.

The five attribution models

A buyer often touches several channels before converting. The model decides which touch gets the credit. Switch it with the selector at the top of the Attribution tab — the same orders re-split instantly across the table.

Model	Who gets credit	Reach for it when
Last non-direct click (default)	The last channel clicked, ignoring direct visits.	You want everyday reporting that credits the channel that actually closed the sale, not the bookmark the buyer returned through.
Last click	The very last channel clicked before ordering, even if it was direct.	You want a strict “final step” view, direct visits included.
First click	The first channel that brought the customer, however long ago within the window.	You’re measuring discovery — which channels introduce new buyers.
Linear	Credit split evenly across every channel the customer clicked.	You want every touch in a long journey to count for something.
Any click	100% credit to every channel the customer clicked.	You’re asking “was this channel involved at all?” per channel.

Caution

Any click over-counts by design. Every touched channel receives full credit for the same order, so totals across rows can exceed actual sales — the report shows a footnote reminding you whenever it’s selected. Use it to gauge a single channel’s involvement, never to sum the table.

A worked example

A buyer takes three steps before placing a $100 order:

1. Clicks a Google Ads link (paid) — touch 1.
2. A week later clicks your newsletter (email) — touch 2.
3. Types your domain directly and checks out (direct) — touch 3.

Model	Credited channel(s)	Sales credited
Last non-direct click	Email	$100 to Email
Last click	Direct	$100 to Direct
First click	Paid	$100 to Paid
Linear	Paid + Email + Direct	$33.33 each
Any click	Paid + Email + Direct	$100 each — $300 across rows for one order

Under every model except Any click, the total stays constant — only the split moves.

Each model is a separate lens over the same eligible touches. Sellerlane defaults Analytics Marketing to Last non-direct click when no model is selected. Sessions are repeated into each model lens so they can be compared; they are not five additional visits. A report may show several models only with the attribution-model dimension, and suppresses cross-model totals, comparisons, and time series rather than adding incompatible answers.

The order’s original attributed sale is dated when the order is placed. A later cancellation, edit, successful refund, or restoration retains the original touchpoint and fractional credit and changes attributed sales on that event’s processed date. It never rewrites the original date. Sold gift-card face value and its refund/reversal are liability events, not attributed sales; Sellerlane uses allocated reportable sales components rather than subtracting the raw gateway refund amount.

The attribution window

Credit reaches back 30 days, anchored at the moment the order is placed. Touches older than 30 days at order time get no credit under any model. The active window is always printed under the model selector, so the report is never ambiguous about how far back it looked.

Channels view vs. Campaign activities view

The view switcher next to the page heading flips between two reports that read from the same engine:

• Channels — every acquisition channel: sessions, sales, orders, conversion, and (once spend exists) cost efficiency, with a sessions-over-time chart for the top five channels. This is the whole-store picture, including traffic no campaign claims.
• Campaign activities — one row per campaign, showing only sessions and orders attributed to your campaigns, each row linking to that campaign’s report. Because it excludes everything you didn’t track through a campaign, its totals will not match the Channels view — that’s expected, not a bug.

Both views share the date-range presets (last 7 / 30 / 90 days, year to date) and the model selector.

Channel types and classification

Every touchpoint is sorted into one of seven channel types. Classification is automatic: an explicit UTM medium wins first, then the referring host is matched against known search and social domains, then the direct and referral fallbacks apply.

Channel type	How a visit lands here
Email	Links in your emails — campaigns and automations.
Paid	Paid-ad UTM mediums such as cpc or paid-search.
Social	A social UTM medium, or a referrer like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or X.
Organic	Unpaid traffic from search engines like Google or Bing.
Direct	No known source — a typed address, a bookmark, or a hidden referrer.
Referral	A link on another website that isn’t search or social.
Unknown	Traffic seen but not classifiable from its UTM or referrer data.

Two special rows appear alongside the channels:

• Unattributed — orders that couldn’t be linked to any marketing channel: phone orders, visits without tracking data, or buyers who declined tracking.
• Point of sale — orders rung up in person at the register. POS isn’t an acquisition channel, so these orders are labeled and grouped separately rather than polluting the Direct row.

Metric glossary

The column definitions below match the in-app tooltips exactly — hover any dotted-underline header in the report for the same text.

Metric	Definition
Sessions	Visits to your online store. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight UTC, so one shopper can create several sessions.
Attributed sales	Event-net total sales credited to this source: merchandise after discounts, plus shipping, tax, duties, tips, fees, and explicit adjustments. Cancellations, edits, successful refunds, and restorations retain their original model allocation but land on their own processed date. Gift-card face value and its refund/reversal are excluded.
Orders	Attributed order-equivalent credit under the selected model. Single-touch and Any click rows are whole orders; Linear breakdowns can be fractional.
Conversion rate	Orders divided by sessions — the share of visits that ended in a purchase.
Attributed AOV	Attributed order-time gross merchandise sales less discounts, divided by attributed orders. It excludes shipping, tax, duties, tips, fees, and later reversals. Attributed total sales per order is a separate ratio.
New / returning customer orders	Orders from customers buying for the first time vs. customers who ordered before.
Cost	Ad spend you recorded for this channel in the selected date range.
ROAS	Return on ad spend: attributed sales divided by cost. 4× means every unit of currency spent returned four in sales.
CPA	Cost per acquisition: cost divided by attributed orders — what one order cost you in ad spend.
CTR	Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions for the ads you recorded on this channel.

See Analytics definitions for identity matching and credit rules, and Financial semantics for the underlying sales formula.

UTM tracking defaults

Sellerlane UTM-tags every link in your marketing emails automatically, so email traffic classifies cleanly — in your own report and in any third-party analytics. The defaults live under Marketing → Settings → UTM tracking, where the feature is on by default.

1. Open Marketing → Settings and find the UTM tracking card. The toggle adds UTM parameters to links in your emails; the current utm_source and utm_medium values are shown beside it.

2. Click Customize to change the defaults: utm_source (default sellerlane_email), utm_medium (default email), and the utm_campaign preset. Leaving source or medium blank resets it to the platform default.

3. Pick a utm_campaign format: Email name, Activity ID, Email name + activity ID (the default), or Email name + send date. A live example under the picker shows what the value will look like.

Caution

Changing utm_medium away from email moves those visits out of the Email channel in analytics. Leave it alone unless a third-party tool forces your hand.

Three rules round out the behavior:

• Automations are always prefixed. Sends from your automations carry a utm_campaign beginning with automation-, so lifecycle traffic stays distinguishable from one-off campaign sends no matter which preset you pick.
• Hand-tagged links are never overwritten. Any UTM parameter you add to a link yourself — in the email builder or anywhere else — is kept exactly as you wrote it.
• Shareable links carry their own UTMs. Each campaign shareable link has per-link utm_campaign, utm_source (default shareable_link), utm_medium, utm_term, and utm_content values you can edit when you create or update the link.

Ad spend, ROAS, and CPA

The Cost, ROAS, CPA, and CTR columns stay empty until you record spend — Sellerlane doesn’t pull ad-platform billing automatically. Enter it on the campaign: open the campaign from Marketing → Campaigns and use the ad spend card to add per-day entries (amount, day, and the channel the spend belongs to). Saved entries feed the report immediately, and the efficiency columns fill in against attributed sales for the same window and model.

Claiming untagged traffic

Not every visit arrives through a tagged link. Below the channel table, the Observed traffic groups panel clusters uncredited visits by their UTM tags and referrer host, with sessions, orders, and sales per group. Filter by search text, channel type, or a custom date range, then Apply.

To make that traffic count toward a campaign, open the campaign’s detail page: assign an observed group as a one-time claim, or create an auto-match rule so future visits with the same UTM or referrer signature are credited automatically. Both are covered in Campaigns.

The Attributed orders panel at the bottom of the Channels view is the order-level drill-down: choose a campaign and see each credited order with its customer, its winning source (message click, shareable link, auto-match rule, and so on), and its merchandise and total sales.

Why these numbers differ from Analytics

The acquisition reports in Analytics and the Attribution tab run on the same engine rules but answer different questions, so they won’t match line for line:

• Different anchors. Attribution anchors at the order date and looks back 30 days for touches; an acquisition report counts sessions on the day they happened. An order placed today can credit a session from three weeks ago.
• Different scopes. The Campaign activities view shows only campaign-attributed orders; Analytics counts everything.
• Model choice. Switching the attribution model re-splits the channel table. The operational Traffic report is unaffected; the Analytics Marketing family uses its own attribution-model filter and defaults to Last non-direct click.

If a channel’s share looks off, check the selected model and date range before assuming a tracking problem — and remember that under Any click the rows are supposed to over-count.

Next steps

Campaigns

Build the shareable links, QR codes, and auto-match rules that generate the touches attributed here.

Marketing & automation

Start at the marketing hub for the workspace tour and your first send.

Analytics

Cross-check attributed sales against store-wide analytics and reports.

Pixels & tracking

Forward conversions to ad platforms with pixels and tracking.