What is Incremental Attribution and how does it work?
Incremental Attribution moves part of the sales from sources like direct visits and email to the ads that most likely caused them, without changing your total.
The problem it solves
Attribution is how TrueROAS decides which ad gets credit for a sale. TrueROAS gives credit based on clicks it can follow. That is strict, and it misses a common pattern: someone sees your ad, does not click, and a day later types your store name into Google, opens an email, or goes straight to your site and buys. The order then lands under Organic & Unassigned as a direct visit, a search or an email, and the ad that started it gets nothing.
Incremental Attribution corrects for this. When you turn it on, a share of the sales from those sources is moved to the ad campaigns that most likely caused them.
It is off until you turn on the Incremental Attribution switch above the campaign table. See How do I set up Incremental Attribution?.
Step 1. Donor sources give up a share
A donor source is a source that hands over part of its sales. Each one has a percentage that says how much it gives. These are the starting values:
| Donor source | Gives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Direct | 50% | Often an ad click that lost its tracking. |
| Branded Search | 60% | Google campaigns on your own brand name pick up demand your other ads created. |
| 80% | Email buyers often first found you through an ad. | |
| Google Organic | 100% | Most of these are people searching for your brand after seeing an ad. |
| Bing (organic) | 100% | The same, on Bing. |
| Snapchat (organic) | 100% | Snapchat visits with no campaign behind them. |
| Facebook (organic), Instagram (organic) | 100% | Visits from these platforms without ad tracking. |
| Google Ads (untracked), Meta Ads (untracked) | 100% | The order came from an ad, but the campaign could not be identified. |
| Payment Processors | 100% | A checkout page such as Klarna or PayPal is never the real source of a sale. |
| Other Sources | 100% | Everything else, such as smaller search engines and the Shop app. |
Example: Direct has $4,000 in sales and gives 50%, Email has $1,000 and gives 80%. Together they put $2,800 into the pot.
Step 2. The pot is split between your ad platforms
Meta Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads and Pinterest can receive credit. Each one's share of the pot depends on two things multiplied together:
- Its spend. A platform you spend more on gets more.
- Its gap. The gap is the sales the platform itself reports minus the sales TrueROAS tracked for it. A big gap means the platform claims many sales that TrueROAS could not follow by clicks, which is where the missing credit most likely belongs.
Example with the $2,800 pot:
| Spend | Platform reports | TrueROAS tracked | Gap | Spend x gap | Share | Receives | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta Ads | $6,000 | $19,000 | $15,000 | $4,000 | 24 million | 80% | $2,240 |
| Google Ads | $2,000 | $8,000 | $5,000 | $3,000 | 6 million | 20% | $560 |
If no platform has a gap, the pot is split by spend alone.
Two donor sources skip this step. Google Ads (untracked) goes entirely to your Google campaigns and Meta Ads (untracked) goes entirely to your Meta campaigns, because those orders are already known to come from that platform.
Step 3. A cap stops a platform from getting too much
Each platform has a cap. At the starting value of 100%, a platform can never end up with more sales than it reports itself. In the example Meta reports $19,000 and TrueROAS tracked $15,000, so Meta has room for $4,000 of extra credit. It receives $2,240, which fits.
If a platform's share is larger than its room, it is filled up to the cap and the rest goes to the other platforms that still have room. If no platform has room left, the remainder stays with the donor source. Credit is never invented.
You can lower a cap when you believe a platform over-reports, or raise it when you know it drives more than it gets. You can also leave the platform's view-through sales out of its room.
Step 4. Credit is passed down to campaigns, ad sets and ads
Inside a platform, campaigns are weighted the same way, by spend and gap. Inside a campaign, the credit goes to the ad sets and ads with the most spend.
Branded Search works inside Google: a share of the sales of the Google campaigns you marked as branded moves to your other Google campaigns. To mark campaigns as branded, see How do I mark my Google branded search campaigns?.
What you see in the table
- Campaign, ad set and ad rows show higher Sales, Conversion, New Customers and Assist, and every ratio built on them changes: ROAS goes up, CPA goes down.
- The rows under Organic & Unassigned go down by the same amount.
- The Summary row keeps the same Sales. Incremental Attribution moves sales between rows. It does not add any.
- Next to the switch, a green label such as +$2,800 impact shows how much was moved in your date range.
- Counts can have decimals, for example 12.4 conversions, because an order can be shared.
Good to know
- The switch and its settings are saved to your login. Other people on the store keep their own setting, so two people can see different campaign numbers for the same period.
- It also changes the numbers on the Dashboard for your login. Which cards change is explained in What do the Meta, Google and TikTok cards mean?.
- Snapchat and Bing campaigns cannot receive credit. Their organic visits can only give it.
- The split uses all your campaigns. Searching or clicking a platform button does not change how credit is shared.
- It does not change your orders, the numbers inside your ad platforms, or what TrueROAS sends back to them.
- It is a model, not a measurement. The starting percentages are sensible defaults, not facts about your store. Adjust them to how your customers buy.