Setup checklist

Attribution needs three things from you before the dashboard means anything: your visits, your ad spend and your conversions. This page puts the setup in the order that gets you a working dashboard fastest, says what can be done before your developer is finished, and what to expect while the first data arrives.

1. Get your visits in

If your site runs on Shopify or your tracking already flows through Segment, connect the platform and skip the code; Connect your data lists these and the other fast lanes. Otherwise, add the snippet to your pages and call page(), identify() and track() as described in Install the snippet.

This is usually the step that waits on a developer. The next step does not have to wait for it.

2. Connect your ad platforms now

Do this on day one, even if tracking is still being implemented. Go to Settings → Ad Integrations and connect every platform you spend on. From that moment Attribution pulls your spend daily, creates a filter for each campaign and tags your ads so that clicks can be matched to visits. By the time visits start arriving, the ads they came from are already known and have spend behind them. Ad integrations explains what each connection does.

3. Make sure the data is flowing

Once the snippet is live, open a page of your site and watch the events arrive in the Events Stream, as described in Test your install. Look for three things: page events that carry the URL and the referrer, an identify event with the email when someone signs up or logs in, and track events with a revenue property for purchases. After that first check, the Overview page in Settings is the standing health check: it shows which kinds of data are arriving and when each was last seen.

4. Then connect your conversion integrations

Your CRM, billing or booking tool can send conversions to Attribution through a conversion integration. Those tools match their records to people by email, so connect them only once page() and identify() run on your site; a record whose person was never identified lands in Unknown Source, with no visit to credit. If your site already sends conversions with track(), you can skip this step.

5. Pick what the dashboard measures

Two settings decide what the numbers mean. The Conversion Event is the event the dashboard counts and credits, your purchase, your signed deal or your demo request. The Revenue Group decides which revenue is counted; All Revenue is the default and right for most projects. Set both, choose the attribution model you want to start with, and save the result as a view so everyone on the team sees the same numbers; see Saved views and the Dashboard report.

6. Give it time, and read while you wait

The first days are thin. Visits appear after the next data refresh, spend arrives once a day, and Google clicks can take up to a day to match. More than that, attribution improves as more journeys complete: a model can only split credit across the visits it has seen, so the longer Attribution has been collecting, the more of each conversion's history it knows about.

Four pages make the first dashboard easier to read while it fills:

Visits & Visitors: what a visit records and how visitors are recognised across visits.
Channels, filters & groups: how the dashboard rows are organised.
Default traffic sources: the rows every project starts with, from Direct and Organic to Unsegmented and Unknown Source, and what lands in each.
The Dashboard Builder: from the first page views it shows what your unsegmented traffic consists of, and lets you turn it into filters of your own.
Attribution models: the five ways credit can be split.

For a worked case of all this on one visitor, read A visit to conversion example.

If you have any questions please reach out to [email protected].