Attribution is how Converge assigns sessions or events to specific touchpoints—like channels, campaigns, or referrers. These events include conversions like Placed Order or earlier steps like Viewed Product. Converge processes attribution in two steps:
  1. Session attribution: assigning a session to a channel, campaign, adset or ad.
  2. Event attribution: assigning credit for an event to the different sessions a user had.
This gives you a clear view of which channels are driving customers and how they contribute to your business success.

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Session attribution

Session attribution is how Converge determines where a visit on your site comes from based on the landing page URL, referrer and certain click IDs or tracking parameters.

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What is a session?

A session is a single visit to your website from a specific source within a set time frame. Sessions start and end based on these rules:
  • Sessions time out after 60 minutes of inactivity — If you visit our website, leave the window open, and continue more than 60 minutes later, a new session starts.
  • Different sources start new sessions — If you land from a Facebook ad, leave, and return through a Google Ads ad 30 minutes later, that starts a new session.

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Example

Let’s say two users search for your company on Google. One clicks on a paid ad from Google Ads, the other clicks an organic search result. They land on: Converge sees both users coming from www.google.com, but the gclid parameter that Google Ads attaches to the URL tells us the first came from a Google Ads campaign. The second visit has no gclid, so we attribute it to Google’s organic search. So we can attribute to the following Channels:
  • Paid click: Google
  • Organic click: Google (Organic Search)
To go any deeper—like understanding which campaign, ad set, or ad drove the click—we need tracking parameters.

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Tracking parameters

Tracking parameters provide context about session sources through extra URL fields. For example, someone clicks your search ad from Google Ads. The URL might look like: https://www.example.com/?gclid=123456789?cvg_source=google&cvg_cid=98765&cvg_adid=12345 Here’s what we can extract:
  • gclid: 123456789
  • cvg_source: google
  • cvg_cid: 98765
  • cvg_adid: 12345
If you’ve added Google Ads as a Marketing Source
, Converge fetches your campaigns, ad sets, and ads—including their unique IDs. We then match those IDs with what we find in the landing page URL. So we can attribute:
  • Channel: Google
  • Campaign: Campaign A
  • Ad set: Ad set 1
  • Ad: Ad variant D
Find more details on how Converge attributes sessions here.
Converge relies on correct tracking parameters to correctly attribute your sessions. Learn more about setting up the tracking parameters here.

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Event attribution

Event attribution assigns credit for a specific event, like a Placed Order or Started Subscription, to the different sessions within a customer journey. Here’s an example journey:
  1. The user sees a Facebook ad but doesn’t click.
  2. The user clicks a Google Search ad and lands on your site, browses products but doesn’t purchase.
  3. The user returns via organic search, adds a product to the cart, but doesn’t complete the checkout.
  4. The user gets a cart abandonment email, clicks it, and completes a purchase with a value of $ 1000.
The sum of all these interactions (touchpoints) a user has with your brand, either on your website or anywhere else, is called a customer journey. Event attribution is the process of applying credit to each touchpoint to determine how much they contributed to the user performing a specific action, like making a purchase.
Converge doesn’t mark events as Conversions. Apply attribution to any event you track in Converge.

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Converge vs In-Platform attribution

Converge attributes events to all observable touchpoints, with some limits. Converge tracks website interactions only, so we can’t see ad views or emails without clicks. Converge only knows if someone viewed an ad or received an email if the user clicked a link and landed on your website. For the example above, Converge can only observe the following three sessions the user had on your website, since we can’t track that a user viewed a Facebook ad without clicking a link in the ad. In many cases, your ad platforms will also try to attribute your events. We call this In-Platform Attribution and it can show discrepancies when compared to Converge. Neither Converge nor the ad platform is wrong. They all just have limited perspective on the truth. In our earlier example:
  • Converge attributes the purchase to any of the three sessions it observed according to the attribution model.
  • Facebook attributes the purchase to the ad view (even without a click). It will ignore all other touchpoints.
  • Google Ads attributes the purchase to the search ad click. It will also ignore all other touchpoints.
Each platform has limited visibility into user interactions with your brand and uses its own attribution model. This can cause the sum of in-platform attributed purchases to exceed your backend totals, since multiple platforms may each claim full credit for the same purchase.

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Attribution models

Converge supports different attribution models to apply credit to the different sessions in a customer journey. See the following three attribution models where the $1000 value from our example is attributed to the different sessions Converge could observe. Last Touch All credit goes to the last session Converge observed. First Touch All credit goes to the first session Converge observed. U-Shaped Credit is shared: 40% to the first and last sessions, 20% to the ones in between. See all attribution models Converge offers and which use cases they apply to.