What is order attribution?

Order attribution is the record of where a customer came from before placing an order, such as a search engine, another website or a tagged campaign link.

How WooCommerce shows it

WooCommerce added built-in order attribution in version 8.5 (January 2024). You can turn it on or off under WooCommerce › Settings › Advanced › Features. Once it's on:

• The Orders list gains an Origin column.
• Each order's edit screen shows an Order attribution box with the origin, source type, UTM parameters (source, medium and campaign), device type and session page views.
• A Customer history box shows that customer's total orders, revenue and average order value.

WooCommerce uses last-click attribution: the whole order is credited to the last source that brought the visitor to your site. Orders placed before the feature was on show as Unknown, and so can orders where tracking was blocked.

A worked example

Say a shopper finds you on Google, leaves, then comes back a week later from a newsletter link tagged utm_source=newsletter. The order's origin shows the newsletter, not Google.

Why it matters

Attribution tells you which channels bring orders, so you know where to spend time and money. The catch: core WooCommerce Analytics has no attribution report, so totals by channel need an export, a plugin, SQL, or WooCommerce's separate Analytics extension (in early access), which adds attribution reports. Askshelf's orders-by-channel lookup groups orders and net sales by these same fields. Start with WooCommerce order attribution, explained, then see how to see which channels bring the most orders.