Building Bratrax, I became obsessed with the number one enemy of any tracking tool.
Direct/Unknown sales.
I would go to hell and back to try to get that number down. I literally have a stomach reaction when I see tons of Direct sales for new clients that we onboard.
Direct is not a channel.
It doesn't help with optimising your campaigns, it doesn't tell you anything about the order. It's just sitting there and going on your nerves.
We (like others) track where a sale came from with help of UTMs. A UTM is a tag on a link that says this click came from here, and then we create logic where to credit that sale.
The problem is that UTMs are self declarative.
Everyone invents their own taxonomy to then ignore it. utm_campaign and utm_campaign_my_ass mean the same thing.
To combat that, we built systems that read the intent not the label. Because of that, parameters that look different but mean the same thing get matched and credited correctly.
Plus this system is self correcting, meaning every time we see a new version of utm_campaign_my_ass, we add it to our rule system and it gets smarter.
(And yes for those of you wondering, we have tracking templates. But do you really believe that people not using their taxonomy are going to use my taxonomy?)
For most clients that alone resolved more than 90% of their sales.
But every now and then we would onboard clients where we could only get up to 50% of sales attributed.
Being that weird person who still has conversations with clients, I noticed one commonality.
They all had a third party app for consent banner.
In most cases the app was installed reactively rather than planned. They would get a complaint, install whatever is leader on the market (free version in most instances) and not pay too much attention to what the app did after that.
Now I am not going to go into how consent banner laws work, or what you should do where. More about that another time.
What I would like to point out is the core mechanics.
Most of our clients come from the US, where consent is assumed in most states. Being in panic mode at the time they make this decision, they typically install the most restrictive version of the consent app, which forces the banner on everyone no matter what territory they come from.
When users are presented with that option to pick accept or reject, some will naturally reject. And when a user rejects consent, there is no more tracking.
Your app literally tells Shopify's sandboxed environment to block any server request from trackers like ours, and even Shopify's own.
So attribution goes bye bye.
Now note, you reacted to something that happened to protect yourself from legal liability… by destroying the system that actually gives you some type of visibility on how you are spending your marketing dollars.
To test our assumption, we asked two clients to remove third party apps and set Shopify’s native banner for GDPR. It has geolocational setups that don't enforce restrictive banners in territories that are not requesting it.
For both of them Direct sales went below 10%.
Moral of the story, don't be dummy. Go look at your apps list before you close this — you do not need to be sitting at 50% unattributed sales for this to be costing you. If there is a third party consent banner in there, it is probably quietly screwing things up for you.
— Brat
P.S. You can take my word for any of this, or you can check it against your own numbers. Connect your store and your ad accounts to Bratrax and you're looking at your own dashboards, with every sale traced back to what actually drove it. Run it beside whatever you use today, and keep whichever one you trust.
P.P.S. Not ready to connect anything yet? Poke around our demo — synthetic data, but modeled on how real stores actually behave. A minute to get in, then click around like you own the place.
