Introduction
Tracking and attributing sales to campaigns are vital to understanding the efficacy of a test on user behaviour. Here, we'll explain how we do this.
Sales Event Tracking
In order to quantify a sale and attach it to a campaign, we must first capture the event. We do this by mapping your site confirmation page - in many cases this may be something that contains /checkout/confirmation or /thankyou but we can create regular expressions to account for any variations.
When a user becomes a customer and makes a sale, we track this as an event. Alongside this event, we scrape the order ID (for deduplication purposes) as well as any other relevant information like order value (which forms the basis for revenue attribution).
Attribution
We use a Purchase Cycle Length (PCL) model to attribute sales and revenue to Accelerate campaigns. The PCL is individual for each website, and is based on the average time it takes for customers to make their first purchase after their first visit.
We apply the following logic to attribute sales and revenue to a campaign:
For each sale, look backward by the number of days defined by the PCL.
All campaigns that were seen in that time window get attributed incremental revenue from the sale.
If a campaign was seen multiple times within the window, we attribute only once (to its last impression before the sale).
If multiple sales happened in a short time, we still follow the same logic - look at each sale separately and go back from it PCL number of days to attribute revenue to all campaigns seen in that window.
How do we measure PCL?
To measure a website's PCL reliably, we require:
At least 3,000 sales, and
At least 2 months since the first recorded sale
We exclude data from the 10 days leading up to Cyber Monday and Christmas, as sales during this period tend to occur more quickly and can skew the PCL calculation.
For new websites with limited data, we use an estimated PCL based on the average PCL of websites with similar average order value (AOV) and conversion rate (CR), until sufficient data is available for a reliable measurement.
Once a website's PCL is measured, it remains in use for one year. After that, it is automatically renewed based on data from the previous year. Partners also have the option to manually override the PCL from the platform if they wish to set a custom attribution window.