Fri 5/15 | Edition# 328 | Stop letting last-click steal...

If you’re still making budget decisions off last-click attribution… respectfully, your email and SMS program is getting absolutely played.

Those channels are doing the hard work all week:
Building trust. Creating urgency. Bringing people back.

Then Meta sneaks in at the last second like “yeah we got the sale 😎” and walks away with all the credit.

So today, we’re breaking down 5 ways to actually measure what’s driving revenue before you slash budget from the channels quietly carrying your entire retention program.

Anyway… let’s go make attribution teams uncomfortable. 👇

Knowledge Drop:

The fastest way to write copy that converts is to stop guessing and start mining the exact language your customers already use. Jimmy shares a plug-and-play AI prompt that turns reviews, emails, and support tickets into a marketing glossary in minutes.

You’re Invited! Your ESP is Hiding Revenue and AI Just Found It 😉

Your ESP is sitting on a ridiculous amount of data.

Flow revenue. Engagement. Segment decay. Campaign trends.

And the problem isn’t accessing it, it’s pulling all of that data manually and then never really knowing what to do with it all.

Well, Omnisend just launched a way to manage your email program through Claude and ChatGPT, so instead of digging through dashboards and exporting spreadsheets for 45 minutes, you can just… ask for the data.

So on May 20, we’re going live with Omnisend to show exactly how we’d use it inside a real retention program.

What we’re covering:
• The reports hiding the biggest revenue opportunities
• How to spot dead segments before deliverability tanks
• Revenue-per-email breakdowns in seconds, not spreadsheets
• Which AI-generated insights are actually useful (and which are complete BS)
• Live demo with Bernard Meyer from Omnisend’s AI team

This is one of those “people will wish they learned this sooner” moments.

Join us live on May 20 → Register free

Stop letting last-click steal credit from your email and SMS

A typical purchase looks like this. A customer opens an email Tuesday morning, scrolls Instagram at lunch, gets an SMS reminder Wednesday, browses on their phone Friday, and checks out from their laptop on Saturday. Last-click attribution hands the entire sale to whichever ad got clicked last. Your email and SMS, which did most of the warming up, end up subsidizing the rest of your spend.

That's the attribution problem in ecom. Here's how to fix it without burning a quarter on attribution theory.

Know why your attribution is lying

Customers rarely take a straight path to purchase. Between cross-device browsing, privacy updates, and channels that don't talk to each other, your reports drift further from reality every quarter.

Four reasons your numbers are off:

• Multi-touch reality. Customers see your brand 5 to 9 times before they buy. One channel gets the credit, the rest get ignored.

• Cross-device browsing. A customer browses on mobile, switches to desktop, completes on tablet. Most attribution tools see three different sessions.

• Privacy and tracking gaps. iOS updates, third-party cookie deprecation, and ITP have hollowed out pixel-based tracking. Open rates are inflated, click data is partial, and view-through is mostly gone.

• Tool sprawl. Omnisend/Klaviyo, Postscript, Triple Whale, GA4, and your Shopify dashboard each report different revenue. Add them up and you "made" 130 percent of your actual sales.

Fixing attribution starts with measuring on top of the gaps your current stack creates.

Pick the model that fits the question you're asking

Attribution models give credit to the touchpoints in your customer journey. The right model depends on what you're trying to learn.

Single-touch models:

• First-click credits the first interaction. Useful for awareness and top-of-funnel campaigns.

• Last-click credits the final touch before purchase. Useful for direct response, blind to the work that set up the sale.

Multi-touch models:

• Linear spreads credit evenly across every touchpoint.

• Position-based weights the first and last touchpoints heaviest, with the middle splitting the rest.

• Time-decay weights touchpoints closest to purchase.

• Algorithmic uses AI to assign credit based on actual impact across thousands of journeys.

Algorithmic models are the modern standard for a reason. They learn from your data instead of guessing.

Run these 5 plays for email and SMS attribution

1. Tag every link with consistent UTMs

The cheapest, most reliable layer of attribution is also the most ignored. Every link in every email and SMS should carry UTM parameters that tell GA4 (or your warehouse) what campaign, source, and medium drove the click.

Best practices:

• Standardize naming conventions across the team. email_promo_bf should always look like that, never email-promo-BF or EmailBFPromo.

• Use a UTM builder that auto-fills the right format. Most modern ESPs have one built in.

• Shorten links inside SMS to save characters without losing the tags.

Pro tip: spin up a shared UTM doc that lists every campaign type, source, and medium your team is allowed to use. Drift kills attribution faster than tool gaps do.

2. Layer in self-reported attribution

The biggest attribution upgrade you can make is a single survey question.

A one-question post-purchase survey ("How did you hear about us?") layered on top of pixel-based attribution tells you what the data can't see. Tools like Fairing, KnoCommerce, and Sherlock plug into Shopify and feed the answers straight into your dashboards.

What it unlocks:

• Catches dark social, podcasts, word-of-mouth, and channels that never tag a click

• Calibrates your other models against what customers actually report

• Cuts through cross-device chaos because it asks at the moment of purchase

If you only add one thing this quarter, add this.

3. Move beyond last-click with multi-touch

Last-click overcredits the easy wins. Email gets blamed for "low" revenue when it actually warmed up half the buyers your paid social converted at the finish line.

Switch your default reporting view to a multi-touch model. Most modern ESPs and analytics platforms offer position-based or time-decay reporting natively. Klaviyo's attribution settings, GA4's data-driven model, and Triple Whale's pixel all support this.

How to roll it out:

• Pick one multi-touch model and stick with it for at least 90 days

• Compare it against last-click side by side, not as a replacement at first

• Reallocate budget where the new model shows email or SMS doing more lifting than last-click suggested

4. Run holdout tests to measure real incrementality

Attribution tells you what got credit. Incrementality tells you what actually drove revenue.

The cleanest way to find out: hold out a random 10 percent of your audience from a campaign and compare their purchase rate to the group that received it. The difference is the campaign's true lift.

AI-powered tools like Haus, Recast, and Measured automate incrementality testing across channels, including email and SMS. Without those, your ESP can still run a basic holdout. Klaviyo, Omnisend, and Sendlane all support audience suppression for testing.

Run one holdout test per quarter on your highest-volume flow. The first one usually reframes how you think about email's contribution.

5. Connect your stack so attribution flows in real time

Attribution data is only useful if it shows up where decisions get made. Wire your ESP, SMS platform, GA4, and post-purchase survey into one dashboard.

Practical setup:

• Pipe ESP and SMS events into your warehouse or BI tool (Triple Whale, Polar, Northbeam, or a custom Looker dashboard all work)

• Tag customers with their first-touch source and last-touch source automatically on every order

• Build alerts for week-over-week swings in attributed revenue per channel

When attribution lives in one place, you stop debating which dashboard is "right" and start acting on the trends.

Start with these three moves

Attribution is a long game. But these are the three plays you can roll out the quickest:

1. Add a post-purchase "how did you hear about us" survey this week

2. Audit your UTM hygiene across your last 30 days of campaigns and clean up the gaps

3. Switch your default attribution view from last-click to a multi-touch model

When attribution catches up to how customers actually buy, every other budget call gets sharper. That's how the channels doing the quiet work finally show up on the scoreboard.

DTC wins:

The men's fertility supplement brand, Ties, just raised $1.5M in seed funding led by HumanCo. Co-founded by former D1 athletes Luke and Camryn Novak, Ties is tackling a category women have had for years and men haven't. With male fertility rates declining steadily for decades, the preconception space is wide open, and Ties just got the capital to claim it.