How does the LTV page decide which channel a customer belongs to?
Each customer counts under the channel that got credit for their first order in the past 12 months, together with all their later orders.
One channel per customer
Attribution is how TrueROAS decides which ad or channel gets credit for a sale. On the LTV page, each customer counts in one channel only. TrueROAS takes the customer's first order in the past 12 months and puts the customer in the channel that got credit for that order. Every later order of the same customer in that period counts in that channel too, wherever it came from.
For example, a customer buys for the first time after clicking a Meta ad, then buys twice more after opening your emails. All three orders count under Meta Ads, and the customer counts as a returning customer of Meta Ads.
Only orders from the past 12 months are looked at. For a customer who first bought from you before that, their first order inside those 12 months decides the channel. Which orders are in the table, and how TrueROAS recognizes a customer, is explained in Which orders does the LTV table count?.
Which credit is used
The LTV page uses the credit the E-Commerce attribution model gave that first order. Picking another attribution model does not change the LTV page.
When the order has no E-Commerce credit, TrueROAS uses the source saved with the order instead. For an order TrueROAS tracked in your store, that is the last place the customer came from before the order, not counting direct visits. When there is none, the customer counts under Direct.
An order that TrueROAS cannot link to a customer counts under its own credit.
The channel names
The table has a row for each channel that has customers in the past 12 months.
| Row | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Meta Ads | Meta ads, and visits from Facebook and Instagram that did not come from an ad. |
| Google Ads | Ads from Google Ads. |
| Google Organic | Visits from Google search results and Google Shopping results that were not ads. |
| TikTok Ads | TikTok ads, and TikTok visits that did not come from an ad. |
| Pinterest ads and unpaid Pinterest visits together. | |
| Bing | Microsoft Ads, unpaid Bing search visits and visits from Microsoft Copilot together. |
| AppLovin | Ads from AppLovin. |
| Yahoo | Visits from Yahoo. |
| Email links, including email tools such as Klaviyo and Mailchimp. | |
| SMS | Links in text messages. |
| Links shared in WhatsApp. | |
| Referring Sites | Links on other websites. |
| Shopify | Visits that came from a Shopify web address. |
| Direct | Direct visits, and orders TrueROAS could only place by the discount code used. |
| Other source | Everything else, such as Snapchat ads, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, draft orders, in-store (POS) orders, subscription renewals and UTM sources TrueROAS does not recognize. |
| No Key | Orders that came in without any information about where the customer came from. This row is rare. |
To see the sources inside Other source one by one, open its rows as explained in What do the columns in the LTV table mean?.
Good to know
- The channels are worked out the same way for everyone on the store.
- The Incremental Attribution and View-Through switches do not change the LTV page either. See What is Incremental Attribution and how does it work? and What does the View-Through switch do?.
- How to pick the model for the Dashboard and the Ads Manager is explained in How do I change the attribution model and attribution window?.
- The channel table on the Dashboard uses other names and gives each order its own credit, so a customer's repeat orders can count under other channels there. See How do I read the channel table on the Dashboard?.
- Snapchat ads have no row of their own on the LTV page. They are under Other source.
- You cannot move a customer to another channel, merge channels or rename them.