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How touch points, purchase journeys, the three models, and the six dimensions work is covered in the MTA overview. The email/SMS, brand, and channel-level rules are in MTA attribution rules.
Attribution rate is the share of purchases with at least one valid touch in a dimension. It drops when touches are not captured or arrive without the data a dimension needs.
  • Tag every paid, email, SMS, and affiliate link with UTM parameters. A visit with no UTMs and no referrer maps to (none) and cannot be credited.
  • Put the ad id in your ad URLs, for example in utm_content. The ad, campaign, and ad group dimensions need an id that matches your ad platform data.
  • Send your website events from a server-side feed such as Elevar when you can. Browser-only tracking loses touches to ad blockers and privacy settings.
  • Keep UTMs intact across domains. A redirect that strips parameters turns a tagged visit into a direct one.
Attribution health has the full diagnosis checklist. The lookback window is 120 days and is the same for every account.
Two settings are adjustable per account:
  • Email and SMS last-touch credit. Off by default. Ask your SourceMedium contact to enable it if email or SMS should be able to close a sale in the marketing channel, ad, campaign, and ad group dimensions.
  • Which campaigns count as Brand. The tactic is derived from the campaign name, so rename the campaign to change it.
The models, the valid-touch rules, and the 120-day window are the same for every account. For anything else, the touch-level data in obt_purchase_journeys_with_mta_models is in your warehouse, so you can build your own model on it.
Days to conversion is measured from the first valid touch in the selected dimension, not from the first touch of any kind. A journey that starts with an organic visit and sees its first ad click a week later has a longer channel figure than ad figure. A dimension with no valid touch has no figure at all.
Each dimension has its own valid touches. Organic search, referrals, and untagged email visits have a marketing channel but no ad id, so they count for the channel dimension only. A purchase needs at least one touch with a recognized ad id to be attributable by ad. The sm_is_purchase_attributable_by struct shows the answer per dimension for every purchase.
The ad platform counts conversions with its own tracking and its own window. SourceMedium credits each order once, from first-party site events, within 120 days, and gives brand campaigns zero credit. The two will differ. Both ad_platform_reported_revenue and the sm_*_revenue columns are kept on rpt_ad_attribution_performance_daily so you can compare them.
The main dashboard credits each order to a single traffic source using the order’s own UTMs, referrer, and click ids. MTA credits every valid touch in the 120 days before the order and splits revenue across them. Channel totals will not match, and they are not meant to. See Attribution in SourceMedium for the layers side by side. Use fct_order_attribution_signals to see which single source the main dashboard chose for a given order.
Each order gets its own purchase journey. A touch is assigned to the next purchase after it, within 120 days, and never to more than one order. Touches from before a customer’s previous order belong to that earlier order.