Setting up SMS and Email Attribution

Tracking the performance of your strategies and campaigns has always been an integral part of online marketing, and attribution is key to doing that.

What is attribution and why is it so important?

Attribution is the process of connecting user interactions to a specific marketing campaign, or, in other words - where and how your customers came across your product or service.

Since in most cases, there is a time gap between the moment you decide to buy something and the actual purchase, marketers find it hard to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. That is why professional platforms use the so-called conversion windows - they help determine if a sale was influenced by a specific campaign or not.

In this article, you'll learn how email and SMS attribution works and how you can adjust it in Yotpo SMS & Email.

How it works

Once you send out a marketing text message or email to your customers and they make a purchase within the conversion window, we’ll attribute this exact sale to this exact text message or email. Our model attributes the order to the event that occurred last, in other words, the latest customer interaction.

There are two types of customer interactions: Last delivered and Last clicked for SMS, and Last opened and Last clicked for Email. Priority is given to clicks. In simpler terms, if multiple events occur within the same conversion window, the purchase will always be attributed to the click.

Setting up email attribution

Email attribution works with the following methods:

• Last opened or clicked: Attributes the order after a customer with the same ID opened an email or clicked a link in it within the conversion window

• Last opened or clicked (Excluding Apple Privacy Opens): Functions similarly to the method above but excludes Apple's automatic opens, which could impact data accuracy. For more information, see Privacy Changes with iOS 15.

• Last clicked: Attributes the order after a customer with the same ID opened an email and clicked a link in it within the conversion window

To adjust your email conversion window:

1. In your Yotpo SMS & Email main menu, go to Settings > General Settings.

2. Scroll down to Attribution.

3. In the Email conversion window section, select a method.

4. Set a timeframe of up to 10 days based on the frequency of your emails. For bi-weekly emails, set the value to 2-3 days.

5. Click Save.

Conversions will be attributed to your emails according to these settings. You can review your performance in Analytics.

Setting up SMS attribution

With the help of Yotpo’s advanced SMS attribution model, you can measure the effectiveness of each campaign or flow you use. We support two types of conversion windows:

• Last clicked: A subscriber received a text message in the last X days and clicked a link in it

• Last delivered: A subscriber received a text message in the last X day

When discount codes have been used, we’ll attribute their conversions depending on whether the code was generated in Yotpo:

• Scenario 1: If you send text messages containing unique discount codes created in Yotpo SMS, the results will surely be attributed to these exact messages. In this case, the last clicked/last delivered rule does not apply.

• Scenario 2: If you send text messages containing discount codes created outside Yotpo SMS (for example, in Shopify), the conversions will be attributed in line with the last clicked/last delivered rule

To adjust your SMS conversion window:

1. In your Yotpo SMS & Email main menu, go to Settings > General Settings.

2. Scroll down to Attribution.

3. In the SMS conversion window section, set a timeframe under each method:

   • You can set up to 10 days for Last clicked

   • You can set between 24 and 72 hours for Last delivered

     Tip:

     To get more accurate results, we suggest you use a small attribution window for delivered messages (24 hours) and a bigger window for clicked messages (7 days). This is also the default setting in your Yotpo SMS Dashboard.

4. Click Save.

Here is an example of how SMS attribution works:

• If an order comes in and the last event was a delivered SMS, but the SMS was received 2 days before the order, this won’t count as a conversion, since the conversion window of Last delivered is 24 hours

• If the same subscriber received and clicked a link in the text message 5 days before the order came in, then this is within the conversion window of Last clicked and will be considered an attribution