Campaign Attribution

Attribution is the practice of assigning credit for a user conversion to a given campaign or set of campaigns. The goal of attribution is to quantify which campaigns most effectively drive users to take a desired action.

For example, if you are testing different content in three push notification campaigns, you’ll want to track and attribute a conversion event to ensure your team knows which push notification is most effective for your given user base. Some common custom conversion events could be: startedTrial, sharedReview, addedItemToCart.

It’s important to understand how attribution works in Iterable before you start creating campaigns so you can correctly configure your campaign settings, conversion events, and API calls to accurately track and send the right data for your use case. Understanding attribution can also help you interpret the metrics reported in Campaign Analytics, Messaging Insights, and other places in Iterable.

# In this article

# Iterable's attribution models

When creating a campaign in Iterable, you can choose one of two ways to attribute conversion events:

• Time-based attribution
• Attribution by campaignId

Before sending a campaign in Iterable, decide which of these attribution methods you'll use, and make sure you've properly configured your campaign settings and API calls to assign conversions the way you want them to be attributed.

# Time-based attribution

Time-based attribution is Iterable's default attribution model. When a campaign is set up to use time-based attribution, Iterable automatically attributes new occurrences of the designated conversion event to the campaign during the specified attribution period.

Time-based attribution is an easy way to track conversions, since you don't need to specify a campaignId in your event-tracking API calls — so you don't need to ask your engineering team to manually update the events you send to Iterable in order to generate attribution data for your campaigns.

# How it works

Iterable follows a last-touch attribution model. This means that if you send multiple campaigns to a single user, and each campaign has a different time-based attribution period for the same conversion event, Iterable attributes that user's conversion to the most recently sent campaign with an active attribution period.

Time-based attribution assigns conversions based on the date and time that Iterable receives a record of an event (stored in the Iterable-managed documentCreatedAt field) — not the date and time assigned by you when the event was initially created (typically saved in the createdAt field). When you submit a custom event to Iterable with a createdAt timestamp, Iterable doesn’t consider it during attribution.

In some cases, latency, the timing of data syncs, or an update to a custom event that’s already in use can impact the value of the Iterable-managed documentCreatedAt field.

# Attribution by campaignId

The second option for campaign attribution is manually specifying the particular user, campaign, and (optionally) template associated with each conversion. For example, attributing custom events and purchases to a specific templateId can be useful when running A/B tests, where each experiment variation has a different templateId.

With this attribution method, you must include the campaignId and a user identifier (email or userId) when you call Iterable's event- or purchase-tracking API endpoints:

API endpoints for tracking events:

• POST /api/events/track
• POST /api/events/trackBulk

API endpoints for tracking purchases:

• POST /api/commerce/trackPurchase

There are two ways to find the right campaignId and templateId to include in API calls for tracking events or purchases:

• Link parameters
• Browser cookies (only email campaigns from email-based projects can use this option)

# Want to learn more?

For more information about some of the topics in this article, check out these resources. Iterable Academy is open to everyone — you don't need to be an Iterable customer!

Iterable Academy

• Foundations: Creating a Campaign
• Tracking Campaign Conversions

Support docs

• Events Overview
• Tracking Conversions, Purchases, and Revenue