What the six hour attribution window measures

What the number is

When Atomato reports revenue for a campaign, it is reporting orders that followed an interaction with that campaign inside a six hour window. That is the whole claim. It is a time-boxed association between something the shopper did and an order they placed.

Stating it plainly is not a caveat, it is what makes the figure useful. A number you can describe in one sentence is a number you can act on.

Two systems, never added together

Atomato measures in two different ways, because the surfaces work differently.

• NotiFeed, NotiPop and NotiSell use pixel-based click attribution. A shopper interacts, and orders inside the window are attributed to that campaign.
• NotiEmail is measured through discount code redemption. The code that went out with the signup is the link between the campaign and the order.

These count different things, so they are reported separately and must never be summed. Adding a click-attributed figure to a code-redemption figure produces a total that describes nothing.

Attribution is association, not proof

A six hour window tells you an order followed an interaction. It does not tell you the order would not have happened otherwise. Some shoppers who opened a message were going to buy anyway.

That is true of every attribution model in ecommerce, and it is worth holding on to when you read any dashboard. If you want to make a causal claim, you need a comparison, not a bigger attributed number.

Why six hours

A window has to be long enough to cover a normal path from message to checkout, and short enough that the association still means something. Six hours covers a shopper who reads a message, thinks about it, and comes back the same session or later the same day.

Longer windows inflate the figure by catching orders the message had little to do with. That flatters the report and makes it less useful.

Reading a campaign report

Look at engagement and revenue together. A campaign with high engagement and low attributed revenue is being read but not acted on, which is usually a message or offer problem. Low engagement with reasonable revenue per interaction usually means the campaign is well written but reaching too few people.