Order attribution model

Understand the built-in attribution model that determines how much revenue PB is generating for your business through printed inserts.

Introduction

Penny Black has a built-in, configurable attribution model to help determine how much value it is bringing to your business. This can be useful if generating more revenue is a key goal for your use of Penny Black. When an order is placed, we analyze its details to determine if a Penny Black insert influenced the customer's purchase.

This is a stand-alone model, so it doesn’t consider other channels (such as email, SMS or PPC).

Penny Black attribution doesn’t consider more subtle forms of value such as brand reputation enhancement through customer experience, or value through other use cases for Penny Black such as streamlining the returns process or capturing reviews.

Attribution methods

The attribution algorithm will use the following methods to look for a match. If none is found then the order is not attributed.

Direct attribution

We look for scans of printed inserts from orders by the same customer email address, scanned within the attribution window period of the new order being placed.

If any scans are found, we attribute the order related to the most recent scan, at its full value.

Direct attribution is a higher priority than promo codes.

Promo code attribution

This form of attribution is designed for promotional codes that you add exclusively to your Penny Black inserts (you shouldn’t associate promo codes used on other marketing channels or our engine will take all of the credit!). This can be configured either using a manually entered code that you add to your campaign artwork or using our personalised promo code functionality which creates this association automatically.

If a promotional code was used on the order and that code is associated with any campaign active at that time, then we attribute the full value of that order. In more detail, this works as follows:

• If a promo code was used on the order, we look for campaigns with prints that are associated with this promo code and were active at the time the order was placed.
• If any matching campaigns are found we look to see if this customer received any prints from past orders on any of these campaigns.
  • If we find one, we attribute the most recent print.
  • Otherwise, if the customer received no orders with this print then we assume the code was shared by another customer and we just attribute the campaign rather than an order.

Subscription attribution

Penny Black does not consider a subscription reorder for full direct attribution since the customer is already signed up to receive future orders. Any order marked as a subscription reorder has special handling for attribution.

If a customer has scanned within the attribution window before a repeat purchase

• if the value of the order has increased from the order associated with the scanned insert then we consider this an upsell and apply the configurable upsell percentage credit for that order.
• Otherwise, if the value of the order is the same, we will apply the configurable reorder percentage credit for that order.

See Configuration below for the managing these settings.

What is considered a subscription reorder?

This is primarily available for Shopify brands using the order tag “subscription reorder”. This tag is used by subscription platforms, like Recharge.

An is_subscription_reorder parameter also exists on our orders ingest API for bespoke integrations.

Configuration

The attribution algorithm can be configured on the General tab in merchant Settings

The Attribution Window Length field shows how long (in days) before an order is placed we consider any scan from a previous order to impact a future purchase. This setting applies to both Direct and Subscription Reorder attribution methods and defaults to 30 days.

Excluding orders from attribution

You can exclude orders by customer email address. This is important if you use any common email addresses internally within your business for placing orders (such as in-store or wholesale orders). Any orders placed with an email from the configured list will be ignored for attribution:

Subscription reorder configuration

The following settings impact the subscription reorder attribution, allowing you to fine-tune how much credit you give to Penny Black for engaging with inserts:

Viewing attribution results

Attribution results are described through metrics on the performance dashboard:

• Transactions - The number of attributed orders
• Conversion Rate - The number of transactions divided by number of prints as a percentage
• Revenue - The total amount of revenue from attributed orders
• AOV - The average order value of attributed orders
• RPP - Revenue per print (revenue divided by number of prints)

For more details on these metrics see the Performance page section.

Checking individual order attribution

Basic attribution info for each order can be found by clicking into it on the Activity page. This will show whether the order was attributed, the type of attribution, the order and campaign it was attributed to and for how much:

If you need more granular detail for many orders then Scale customers can contact Support for an export of your data.

Rerunning attribution

You cannot re-run attribution for any past orders. However, Scale customers can contact Support to perform this for you e.g. if you want to adjust your configuration retrospectively or if you accidentally use a multi-channel promotional code against a campaign.