The attribution report lets you analyze which channels people used before they completed your website goal or bought your product. Unlike basic acquisition reports, it shows various attribution models and conversion paths. By using it, you can understand which touchpoints are generating the most valuable traffic to your website. And this knowledge helps you better allocate your marketing budget.
In the attribution report, you’ll see four subreports:
- Model comparison tool: This report lets you compare the following attribution models: last-click, position-based, first-click, last-non-direct-click, time-decay, linear and custom models.
- Conversion paths: This report shows traffic channels (channel, medium, source/medium, source) that visitors used before they reached a goal or bought something on your website.
- Time to conversion: This report shows how many days it takes for visitors to reach a goal or buy a product on your website, counting from the first session within the lookback window.
- Path length: This report counts the touchpoints people used before they reached a goal or bought something on your website.
To view the report, follow these steps:
- Go to Menu > Analytics.
- Navigate to Reports.
- On the left, click Attribution.
- View the report.
- In each subreport, you can switch between Goal conversion and Ecommerce conversion, select goals and set the Lookback window.
Note: A lookback window is the number of days Piwik PRO looks backward to include touchpoints for goal or ecommerce conversion. For example, for goal conversion that happened on May 10, a lookback window of 10 days will take into account all touchpoints from May 1 to May 10.
- Additionally, in the Model comparison tool and Conversion paths, you can select the minimum path length.
Model comparison tool
With this report, you can try to answer this question: Which traffic channel should get credit for goal or ecommerce conversions on my website? For the purpose of analysis, you can use and compare several attribution models:
- Last click: All credit goes to the last channel the customer interacted with before buying a product or completing your website goal.
- Position based: The first and last touchpoint each gets 40% credit, and the remaining 20% is given evenly to the middle touchpoints.
- First click: All credit goes to the first channel the customer came into contact with before buying a product or completing your website goal.
- Last non-direct click: All credit goes to the last channel, but the direct channel is ignored.
- Time decay: The touchpoints closest in time to the sale or conversion get most of the credit.
- Linear: Each touchpoint in the conversion path shares equal credit for the sale or conversion.
- Custom models
Tip: If you want to analyze each goal separately, you can create separate custom reports with the attribution type. In the custom report, you’ll be able to save the report setup and apply more filters.
Conversion paths
This report shows you traffic channels that customers used before buying a product or completing a goal on your website. Let’s look at an example.
A visitor entered your website through the following channels:
- Campaign / Google / cpc
- Direct / direct / direct
- Search engine / Google / organic
- Website / forbes.com / referral
- Buys your product or completes your website goal
The conversion path report will show you the following path:
- Channel: Campaign > Direct > Search engine > Website
- Source / medium: Google / cpc > direct / direct > Google / organic > forbes.com / referral
- Source: Google > Direct > Google > forbes.com
- Medium: cpc > direct > organic > referral
Now when you analyze this type of data for all your visitors, you will learn which sequence of channels are commonly used and this knowledge may give you some hints where to invest your advertising budget.
Tip: You can use custom channels in conversion paths after creating a custom report under Analytics > Custom reports > Add new report > Attribution.
Time to conversion
This report shows how many days it takes for customers to buy a product or complete your website goal from the time they first interacted with your website within the lookback window. It is a handy tool to understand your business’s specifics because some companies have products or services that sell quickly and others need to work harder to turn visitors into buyers.
Path length
This report shows how many touchpoints visitors go through before they complete a goal or buy a product on your website. Touchpoints are counted within the lookback window and data is typical for your business model, just like in the time to conversion report.
You can export this report to a CSV, XML, JSON, or JSON (KV) file format or customize the report.