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How does TrueROAS build a customer journey?

Each journey lists the sources a customer came through before an order, built from the visits TrueROAS saved and tidied up by a few fixed rules.

What a customer journey is

A customer journey is the list of sources a customer came through before an order, from first to last, for example Meta Ad, then Google Organic, then Email. Each step is a source, not a single page or a single ad.

Attribution is how TrueROAS decides which ad gets the credit for a sale. A journey does not give the credit to one source. It shows all of them, in the order the customer came through them.

Which orders are included

  • Every order placed in your date range, from the start of the first day to the end of the last day, in your store's time zone.
  • On a Shopify store, every order TrueROAS saved counts, whatever its status. That includes draft orders, in-person sales through Shopify POS, and cancelled or refunded orders.
  • On a WooCommerce store, orders that are pending payment, on hold, failed or in the trash are left out, and so are most cancelled orders.
  • Orders with a total of 0, such as free samples, are included, also when Hide free orders is on. That setting only changes the pages listed in How do I hide free orders from my reports?.
  • The attribution model does not change which orders are included or what their journeys look like.

Which visits are saved with an order

  • When a new order comes in, TrueROAS saves the visits it can link to that customer within your attribution window before the order. The window is 28 days unless your store uses another one. See How do I change the attribution model and attribution window?.
  • The visits are saved once. A new window only changes the orders that come in after you change it.
  • Pages a customer opens inside your store within 2 hours of a visit, on the same device and browser, belong to that visit.
  • Back-to-back visits from the same ad or source are saved as one visit.
  • Orders you imported from before you installed TrueROAS were not tracked by TrueROAS. Where they came from is explained in How do I bring in orders from before I installed TrueROAS?.

How the visits become a journey

Each time the page loads, TrueROAS tidies the saved visits of every order, in this order:

  1. It sorts the visits from first to last.
  2. It drops direct visits when the customer also came through any other source. Direct only stays when it is the only source.
  3. It counts a visit only once when a visit from the same source was kept within the 10 minutes before it.
  4. If more than 3 visits are left, it keeps the first visit, every ad visit in between and the last visit, and drops the other visits in the middle, such as an email or a Google search. Ad visits are the steps with Ad or Ads in their name, such as Meta Ad, Google Ad, Tik Tok Ad, Bing Ad, Pinterest Ad, Snapchat Ad and AppLovin Ad. When the last visit came from the same source as the first, the last one is dropped too.
  5. It leaves out visits from payment pages, such as paypal.com, shop.app, checkout.shopify.com or pay.google.com, and visits from your own store's address.
  6. It adds the source of the order itself at the end. For most orders this is the source of the customer's last visit that was not direct, so it merges into that step. A Shopify draft order ends with Shopify Draft Order, an in-person sale with Shopify POS and a subscription renewal with Subscription.
  7. It merges steps in a row that have the same name, so Meta Ad, Meta Ad, Google Ad becomes Meta Ad, then Google Ad.

Orders whose steps end up exactly the same are grouped into one journey. An order without any saved visit only has the order's own source, which is Direct unless the order is a draft order, an in-person sale or a subscription renewal. If nothing is left after these rules, the journey reads Unknown.

Why a journey can look shorter than it was

  • Visits TrueROAS could not link to the customer are missing, such as visits on another device or in a private browsing window.
  • Visits from before your attribution window, and visits from before TrueROAS started tracking your store, were never saved.
  • The rules above drop direct visits, quick repeat visits from the same source and, on journeys with more than 3 visits, the middle visits that were not ads.

To see every visit saved with an order, before these rules are applied, click its journey in All customer journeys and open the order. See How do I read the All customer journeys list?.

Good to know

  • Journeys are built the same way for everyone on the store.
  • You cannot change these rules, edit a journey, or rename or merge its steps.
  • What each step name covers, for example why an Instagram visit shows as Meta Ad, is explained in What do the source names in a customer journey mean?.
  • The cards in the middle of the page and the AI Journey Summary leave out the steps Direct, Unknown, Shopify Draft Order and Shopify POS. Only All customer journeys shows every journey.
  • The Dashboard and the Ads Manager count orders by their own rules, so their order numbers can differ from this page. See Why don't my TrueROAS numbers match Meta or Shopify?.