Kevel Attribution FAQ
What is attribution?
Attribution is the process of determining which advertising campaigns contributed to a conversion. Being able to attribute paid media spend to conversions can help advertisers understand the effectiveness of their campaigns and make better decisions about where to allocate budget.
Are there any prerequisites to using attribution reporting?
Attribution reporting is part of Kevel's Retail Media feature set. In order to gain visibility into attribution reporting it is required to use Catalog. Reach out to your Solutions Architect to see if there's a good fit for your use case.
What attribution models are currently supported by Kevel?
Kevel currently supports last-touch attribution, which gives all credit to the last ad engagement (view or click) before a conversion.
Where are the settings configured?
When enabled, attribution can be set up at the Flight level. Product Match type and Lookback windows can be independently adjusted for post-click and post-view events.
How is attribution determined?
Kevel's attribution logic takes four main factors into consideration:
- User: All matching is done based on a user, therefore there must be a valid user key at the time of a decision request and a matching value in the Sales feed.
- Engagement: How the end user interacts with the ad, Kevel supports click or view.
- Match Type: This factors in how closely the promoted product and purchased product are related. Kevel supports four match types:
- Same Product
- Same Category and Brand
- Same Brand
- Same Merchant (a merchant-aware option available to marketplace customers)
- Attribution Window: The number of days between ad engagement and conversion. Kevel currently supports 1, 7, 14, and 30 day attribution windows.
What is the difference between supported Match Types?
The main difference comes down to how closely the purchased item relates to the promoted item.
- Same product: Requires the exact same item to be purchased.
- Same category and brand: Matches products from the same main category and brand.
- Same brand: Matches different products from the same brand.
- Same merchant: Matches any product sold by the same merchant. This is a merchant-aware option available to marketplace customers.
In what order are the attribution criteria considered?
- The system looks for clicks first, then views if no clicks are found.
- If there are eligible click candidates, the system considers the attribution window and match type.
- Looking through the match types in the following order, attribute to the most recent one if multiple are found in the same type. If none are found of a given type, move on next type:
- Same product match.
- Same category and brand match
- Same brand match
- Same merchant match
- Looking through the match types in the following order, attribute to the most recent one if multiple are found in the same type. If none are found of a given type, move on next type:
- If there are no click candidates, the system repeats the process for views.
- If there are still no candidates, the purchase is considered organic and not included in reporting.
Two clicks with the same match type are potentially attributable, which one would get credit?
When two engagements of the same type are equally eligible based on match type, the one that took place closest in time to the purchase will get credit.
Can a conversion event be attributed to more than one ad engagement?
No - Currently we only support single-source attribution models that assign 100% of the credit for an event to a single attributable ad engagement (e.g. click or impression) that was closest to the time of the conversion event.
Is Merchant factored into attribution?
By default, no — purchases are attributed regardless of the merchant that sold the product. Marketplace customers can optionally enable merchant-aware attribution, which adds a Same Merchant match type and a Require Merchant Match option (which requires the purchased product's merchant to match the ad's attribution criteria). See Merchant-Aware Attribution for details. To enable these options, contact your account team or Kevel Support.
Can a single conversion event be reported more than once?
No, each purchase conversion is attributed to a single ad which led to an attributed ad engagement.
How is Category determined in reporting?
Category in reporting represents the Main Category that an item belongs to. This represents the most granular category the product belongs to. Note, this is the category that Kevel’s attribution logic uses for attributing conversions.
Are conversion events counted on the day they occurred or the day of the attributable ad engagement?
All conversions are associated with the day the attributed ad engagement (impression or click), which is in line with the standard process Kevel uses for all conversions.
Why is my GMV low when I know I’ve been making attributable sales?
Attributable conversions can occur up to 30 days after a user's touchpoint. Reports will age over time, up to the length of the attribution window. For example, if a flight is set up with a 30 day attribution window, reports will potentially age out for up to 30 days.
Some of the product details were updated in the catalog, will those new values show in reporting?
Yes, we are set up to pull in the most recent name values for catalog items. We will retroactively update previous activity to reflect the current names.
A purchase event just went through the system but it is not showing up in reporting, what might be happening?
New purchase events take about an hour to be completely processed and reflected in reports. The other thing to keep in mind is that purchases are associated with the day of the ad engagement, not the day the purchase occurred, so you may need to adjust the start date of your report if the purchase was attributed to an earlier click or impression.
A record was sent through the sales feed which counted 10 of the same item being purchased, will this show up in reporting as 1 or 10 purchases?
We will represent this activity as 1 conversion with the GMV value calculated as the quantity * price.
Will purchase events that aren’t attributed be seen in reporting?
No, currently only attributed purchases are displayed in reports.
When Kevel's attribution logs a conversion, what metrics are influenced?
When the Kevel Ad Server logs a conversion due to attribution:
- A Server to Server Conversion is logged for the relevant ad using event ID 3. (See Event ID definitions)
- The GMV for the relevant ad is incremented by the value of the price value * quantity value in the purchase event.