Lifetimely: Attribution Overview and Drill Down

Attribution Overview and Drill Down

At a glance

Attribution Overview compares total Shopify sales with advertising revenue, spend, CPA, and ROAS across connected platforms. Use it to find the channel behind a change in attributed performance, then use Drill Down to inspect the contributing campaigns, ad groups, or ads.

Availability and data freshness

Connect the relevant Google, Facebook, or TikTok ad integration for platform spend and revenue. Shopify Data requires usable Shopify Customer Visits.

Freshness and history: Lifetimely does not publish an Attribution processing SLA or universal historical start date.

On this page

• Open and control Overview
• Read the cards and charts
• Understand the data contract
• Interpret the metrics
• Investigate with Drill Down
• Reconcile differences

Open and control Overview

Open Attribution > Overview (/attribution/overview). If Attribution is not included in the store's plan, Lifetimely directs the store to the trial page instead. An active trial displays its remaining days and a link to pricing.

Choose dates, comparison, and chart grain

If no report date has previously been saved in this browser, Time period starts seven days ago and ends yesterday in the store timezone. A date range selected on another report is remembered in browser storage and overrides this fallback; Overview then rebuilds its comparison and chart grain from the remembered range.

• Time period: Choose custom dates or Today, Yesterday, This week (Sun - Today), Last week (Sun - Sat), Last 7 days, Last 28 days, Last 30 days, Last 90 days, Last 6 months, Last 12 months, This year, or Last year. “Last” rolling presets end yesterday; Today and the current-week preset include the current day.
• Group by: Group the selected range by Day, Week, Month, Quarter, or Year. Lifetimely initially chooses a grain based on the range length, aiming for roughly 14 buckets. Changing this control changes aggregation, not the selected population.
• Compare to: Choose Previous period, Previous period, day of week, Same period, year prior, Year prior, day of week, or Custom period. Previous period uses the immediately preceding equal-length range. The weekday options preserve the selected range's day span while aligning the prior period's ending weekday or the prior year's starting weekday, respectively.
• Comparison time period: This picker is disabled until Compare to is Custom period. Comparison values appear as percentage changes on cards; the charts do not draw a comparison series.

All date boundaries are sent in the store timezone. The current page has no complex product, customer, order, campaign, country, or UTM filter and no CSV export. Store-wide prefilters, display currency, timezone, connected ad accounts, and campaign exclusions are supplied automatically from store context. Change prefilters in settings and ad-account or campaign exclusions in the marketing profile, not on Overview.

Choose the attribution source and platforms

The Attributed Sales controls affect the advertising section; they do not change the Shopify All Sales cards.

• Show: Platform Data is the default. Switch to Shopify Data to replace platform-reported conversion revenue with revenue attributed from Shopify Customer Visits. Spend still comes from connected ad platforms.
• Attribution model: Available only for Shopify Data. Choose First Touch or Last Touch; Last Touch is the initial request default.
• Platforms: Google, Facebook, TikTok, and TikTok GMV Max are all selected initially. Clear a platform to remove its data from the attributed cards, charts, and platform breakdown. “Combined” is calculated from the selected platform series rather than being another connected source.

Caution: Leave at least one individual platform selected. The report request always retains its Combined series, but a request containing only Combined produces a zero-valued time series.

Other features on Overview

• Each card includes an information tooltip and a whole-number percentage change from the selected comparison period. For spend and CPA, the visual comparison indicator treats a decrease as favorable; that styling does not change the arithmetic.
• Hover over the area charts to compare selected platforms at a bucket. The card charts have no visible legend toggle; use the platform controls above them to add or remove series.
• Ask AI receives the active date range and the returned Overview report data. Use it for a follow-up analysis, but verify its answer against the selected source, model, and platforms.
• The page includes a short Overview explainer video. Overview does not currently link a chart point or platform card directly to Drill Down.

Read the cards and charts

All Sales

All Sales is the Shopify baseline for the full selected period. It is not limited to orders with an advertising touch.

Each card aggregates the selected period and compares it with the comparison period. Overview does not provide an order-level expansion, so use Shopify and a sales detail report to check the baseline.

Attributed Sales

The first row of four cards shows the combined value across the selected platforms: Attributed revenue, Marketing spend, Blended CPA, and Blended ROAS. The next row shows an average across platforms for each metric and charts the individual platform series. Do not add an average card to the combined card or interpret the average as an additional channel.

Platform Breakdown then gives one card per returned platform plus Combined, with Spend, CPA, Conversions, and ROAS for the full selected range. It is the clearest place on Overview to compare individual platform totals. Platform-level revenue appears in the revenue chart rather than in the breakdown card.

Data contract: what goes into Overview

Where the data comes from

How store settings and dates affect the result

• Overview sends the selected dates, comparison dates, grouping, platforms, source, model, display currency, store timezone, shop settings, and store-wide prefilters in one request.
• Platform Data follows the reporting semantics of each connected ad source. Its event date can differ from the Shopify order or visit date, and the source may later revise modeled or late conversions.
• Shopify Data uses Shopify Customer Visits for tracked attribution, but the implementation available in this repository does not establish the attribution window, direct/unknown-touch rules, identity joins, or mutation behavior.
• Connected-account selection and campaign-term exclusions can remove ad spend and platform activity without removing Shopify orders. Prefilters can remove commerce orders without equivalently removing platform-reported conversions. Either setting can therefore change the gap between All Sales and Attributed Sales.
• Currency values are requested in the store's display currency.
• Client query results are considered fresh for 60 seconds and do not automatically refetch when the browser window regains focus. This is UI caching only, not a promise that the underlying source imports are current.

Check a value

1. Record Time period, Comparison time period, Group by, Show, Attribution model when available, and every selected platform.
2. Confirm the store timezone and display currency, then inspect store-wide prefilters and the connected accounts and campaign exclusions in the marketing profile.
3. For All Sales, compare the same date boundaries with Shopify and Sales Breakdown or Orders. Account for the Overview revenue label's discount/refund rule and any enabled prefilters.
4. For Platform Data, compare Spend, Conversions, and conversion revenue with the source platform using the same account, timezone, currency, and platform attribution settings.
5. For Shopify Data, confirm the order has a usable Shopify Customer Visit and compare First Touch with Last Touch. Use UTM Explorer to inspect tracked parameters; it offers its own window and model controls, so align them before expecting a match.
6. Continue to Drill Down with the same dates and platform. Re-select the range manually: Overview does not pass its source/model selection to Drill Down, and Drill Down has no source or model control.

Metrics and calculations

For example, if a platform returns $500 spend, $2,000 attributed revenue, and 40 conversions, CPA is $500 / 40 = $12.50 and ROAS is $2,000 / $500 = 4.0X. This proves the displayed arithmetic, not that advertising caused every dollar. Compare the same source, model, dates, and platform before changing budget.

Investigate with Drill Down

Open Attribution > Drill Down (/attribution/drill_down) to move from channel-level results to Platform, Campaign, Ad Group, or Ads rows. It defaults to Campaign, All platforms, 25 rows per page, ascending campaign sort, and two weeks ago through today unless a remembered range or Anomaly Detection deep link overrides it.

Drill Down supports platform filtering for All, Facebook, Google, or TikTok; text search at the selected row grain; sortable returned columns; pagination; and CSV export. Returned columns can include Revenue, AOV, Spend, Clicks, Conversions, CPA, and ROAS; internal ID columns are hidden. The CSV uses the current dates, grouping, platform, sort, and search/filter request rather than only the visible page of 25 rows.

Caution: Drill Down does not expose Platform Data versus Shopify Data, an attribution model, or an attribution window. Do not assume it reproduces Overview's Shopify Data selection.

Reconcile differences

All Sales is higher than Attributed Sales

This is expected when Shopify orders have no qualifying tracked touch. Missing or blocked visit tracking, direct visits, cross-device activity, consent restrictions, disconnected accounts, and attribution-window rules can all leave sales unattributed. First confirm that the difference is population rather than a date, prefilter, currency, or source mismatch.

Platform Data does not match Shopify Data

Platform Data uses each ad platform's identity, attribution windows, conversion dates, and possible modeled conversions. Shopify Data uses Shopify Customer Visits and the selected First Touch or Last Touch model. The two systems can assign different revenue to the same channel without changing actual Shopify sales; use All Sales as the commerce baseline rather than forcing the attributed totals to match.

Overview does not match Drill Down or UTM Explorer

• Drill Down has no selectable Overview source/model and does not offer TikTok GMV Max in its visible platform filter.
• UTM Explorer groups tracked UTM values and has a selectable 1-, 7-, 14-, or 28-day window plus First Touch, Last Touch, or Linear. Overview does not expose a window and does not offer Linear in its UI.
• The reports also have different grains: period/platform in Overview, advertising entity in Drill Down, and UTM value in UTM Explorer.

Align store, exact date boundaries, timezone, display currency, connected account, platform, source, model, and—where offered—window before comparing.

Next actions

• Use Drill Down to locate the campaign, ad group, or ad behind a platform change.
• Investigate unusual dates with Anomaly Detection.
• Audit tracked source, medium, and campaign values in UTM Explorer.