It is perfectly normal to have unattributed revenue for an attribution model. Here's why it happens, and how to decrease it.
Unattributed revenue is the portion of your total revenue that we could not attribute to any paid or organic marketing. There will typically always be some unattributed revenue but it is helpful to have all marketing tracking so the unattributed revenue is minimal.
In the summary row of your ROI reports, Wicked includes the total of all unattributed revenue. This allows you to reconcile your order system revenue against our reports for greater trust in the numbers.
Each attribution model usually has a different amount of unattributed revenue. This can be related to your marketing strategy, buying cycle, or tracking setup. There are generally ways to increase your attribution and decrease your unattributed revenue, and yet there are situations that sometimes can elude tracking and will remain untracked.
While we actively encourage and support you in the quest to track every last dollar, that is not realistic. The focus should be on using Wicked Reports to improve ROI through increasing profitable customer acquisition and lifetime value and decreasing wasted ad spend.
Some common reasons for Unattributed Revenue
- Setup is not complete.
- Organic tracking is turned off.
- The tracking code is not on the landing pages.
- The tracking code is not on the optin form or order form pages.
- The inbound link clicks do not have UTMs, Wicked IDs, or any of our other link ID technologies on them.
- Source data has timestamp issues relative to the link click timestamps.
- Live event or offline sales not being reported/imported correctly.
Factors that Affect Attribution Accuracy
We exist to show you which ads are making money and which aren't at various points of the customer journey so you can see which marketing activities drive revenue, discover where the best leads come from, and stop spending on ads that don’t work.
Note: Statistical significance is determined by sales volume and total attribution. Attribution is performed by proprietary algorithms and relies solely on first-party data and tracking.
The accuracy of Wicked's reporting depends on our ability to match contacts and orders, by email, to tracked digital marketing events such as ad, email, or other tracked clicks - including our custom click events.
We rely on the underlying accuracy, quality, and completeness of the underlying data.
In the case of your CRM (contact source) and shopping cart (order source) we are either interfacing directly with those systems in the case of any of our native integrations, or we are receiving the data from those systems via some other means.
This means we will never, ever, match Facebook or Google conversion data.
From your Contact Source, we must be receive accurate contact create dates and email addresses. From your Order Source we must receive the order date and time stamps, customer email address, and accurate and properly formatted order information.
With respect to tracking data, the two factors impacting the quality and completeness of your data are the deployment of tracking UTMs and our tracking widget or pixel.
Proper UTMs following our recommended naming convention should be deployed on all paid, social, email, and back-links. We try to make this as easy as possible for you by providing an auto-tracking tool for your Facebook ads, an account level tracking template for Adwords, and a link builder tool for your email and social media links.
Your tracking widget or pixel must be deployed on every landing page, optin form, and order form in your marketing funnel to capture such traffic and must not be prevented from capturing traffic by blockers, iFrames, URL shortners, or redirects that could strip or interfere with the detection of UTM tracking parameters.
We provide a tracking validator that you can reference from the Wicked Tools menu on the row of any campaign data with the ROI report. Use this to verify landing page tracking whenever you are in doubt on your numbers for a campaign.
With perfect deployment of UTMs and tracking code with nothing interfering in collection, and perfect data from your CRM and Order Source, the accuracy of our reporting will also be perfect - with the exception of the occasional bug, which we will absolutely fix for you.
Tracking $150,000,000 in ad spend per month that has led to over $4,000,000,000 in revenue, there are obvious trends in attribution. We see about 75% have revenue eligible for *some* attribution on average. Depending on your business model anything over 50% attribution of total revenue could be considered perfectly healthy.
In addition to the configuration and data quality issues mentioned previously in this article, a high ratio of organic or direct traffic, traffic from sources that cannot be tracked, or subscriptions and orders pre-Wicked are among the reasons not all revenue can or will be attributed even for well configured accounts.. Of course we'll work with you to get that number as high as possible, but "perfect" attribution is not required to produce statistically significant results.