When someone purchases a product, the sale is attributed to the referrer of that session.
For example, if someone clicks on your site in Google, looks at a few pages, and purchases a product, Google will be attributed with the sale.
Now, let’s say they find your site through Google, look at a few pages, and leave. The next day, they see a Facebook ad for your product, so they click the ad and buy the product. In this case, Facebook will be attributed the sale because it was the referrer of the session that included the purchase.
This is sometimes referred to as a “last click” attribution model.
As you might expect, this works the same way for the Geographic, Devices, and Campaigns reports; the sale will be attributed to the location, device, and campaign of the session with the sale.
Independent Analytics doesn’t include support for alternate attribution models, but this is a feature we would like to explore in the future.
Sales attribution works differently for the Pages report than the other reports.
If the Pages report showed you the sale where the purchase happened, then you would see all of the sales attributed to the Checkout page. Instead, it is more useful to attribute the sale to the landing page i.e. the first page in the session.
Let’s say someone clicks on your site in Google, lands on “Article A,” views a few products, and then completes a purchase. The credit for the sale would go to Article A.
This is particularly useful for evaluating your SEO landing pages. Rather than measuring their performance by traffic, you can see the number of sales and conversion rate of each page.
