How tinyAlbert Message Attribution Works

Determine the value of your email marketing

Message attribution is a key e-commerce concept. It helps you understand which emails likely led to a Shopify store transaction. Based on the strength of that connection, you can make intelligent decisions about marketing strategy, segmentation, frequency, timing, and more. 

Let me show you how tinyAlbert tackles the sticky question of message attribution.

Understanding message attribution

In an ideal world, you'd digitally trace each milestone in the customer journey, from the campaign launch to buyer opens to the checkout. 

Well, we don't live in an ideal world, do we? Getting granular data of that scale isn't really possible for e-commerce sites and email marketing.

Instead, players in the email marketing industry (including tinyAlbert) use a simple ruling stick. They use a timer to create an attribution window.

Exploring the mechanics of attribution

The attribution window works like this.

Let's say your tinyAlbert account sends out an email on July 1. On July 2, someone opens the email, clicks the link, visits your Shopify store, and completes a transaction.

Simple, right? The short interval between the message open and the store purchase allows us to feel confident in saying that one event led to the other. That the message led to the store conversion.

What if that interval were longer or less linear? What if the reader opens the email on July 2 and 10 days later, scans the message again, does not click the link, but instead goes directly to your store and completes a transaction? 

Can we attribute the transaction to the email message even though the interval was long and the path was a bit twisty? The answer starts to get fuzzy.

tinyAlbert method of message attribution

We hate fuzzy, so tinyAlbert came up with a simple approach to defining an attribution window.

The tinyAlbert attribution window is ten days long. The clock starts ticking when a reader opens or clicks the most recent email. That's the starting point.

• If the reader completes a store transaction within the 10-day window, tinyAlbert attributes that revenue to that email.
• Any reader action after the 10-day window is not attributed to that email.

That's it.

tinyAlbert uses a 10-day attribution window to help you estimate your email messages' revenue and conversion impact.