Session attribution is how Converge determines where a visit to your site came from. The end result is a session that has been attributed at the following levels:

  • Channel: the top-level source of the visit (Google, Facebook, Direct)
  • Campaign: the campaign the user clicked before landing on your site
  • Adset: the adset within the campaign
  • Ad: the specific ad they clicked
For a more general introduction into attribution in Converge, read this.

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Channel

A channel is the broadest source category. It helps you see which traffic source of your marketing is performing best.

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Channel attribution

To attribute a session to a channel Converge roughly follows the following process:

  1. Look for known click IDs in the landing page URL (e.g. gclid, fbclid, _kx)
  2. Look for cvg_source or utm_source values in the landing page URL (cvg_source is prioritized)
    • If it matches a known platform (e.g. facebook, google, klaviyo)
    • If it matches a generic source name (e.g. email, newsletter, sms)
  3. Check the referrer against known domains (e.g. www.google.com, www.facebook.com)

Based on this, Converge assigns a session to a channel. You’ll see many different channels in your reports, but they generally fall into one of these types:

  • Campaign: sessions tagged with click IDs or with cvg_source or utm_source tags set.
    (e.g. Google, Facebook, Klaviyo, TikTok)
  • Organic Search: sessions from known search engines through unpaid results.
    (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
  • Organic Social: sessions from known social networks through unpaid posts.
    (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok)
  • Organic Referral: sessions from unknown websites through a standard link.
  • Direct: sessions that could not be attributed to any channel

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Events without sessions

Sometimes Converge receives a server-side event that can’t be matched to a web session. For example, if a user completes a purchase and your store sends a Placed Order from your server, but the user web session was not tracked because an ad blocker was used.

In that case, Converge still tries to attribute the event to a channel:

  1. If available, use metadata from the event itself. (e.g. Recurring subscriptions, Shopify)
  2. If nothing else is available, fall back to (no value).

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Campaign, Adset, Ad

Below the Channel level Converge will try to attribute a session to a specific campaign, adset or ad the user clicked on before visiting your website.

To attribute a session to a campaign Converge follows the following process:

  1. Look for cvg_cid or cvg_adid in the landing page url. (containing the ID from the campaign and ad clicked on by the user)
  2. Look for utm_campaign in the landing page url.

If Converge can’t find any of these values the sessions won’t be attributed to a campaign, adset or ad and will be shown as (No campaign name), (No adset name) or (No ad) respectively.

Converge relies on Tracking Parameters
 and Marketing Sources
 to correctly attributed a session to a campaign, ad set or ad.