Sources & attribution
How DataBull decides where a visit came from, and which visit gets credit for a sale.
Channels
Every visit gets a channel from its referrer, UTM tags or ad click id: Organic Search, Organic Social, AI (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude…), Referral, Email, Paid, Affiliate or Direct. utm_source and ?ref= win over the referrer, so tag links you control.
In-app browsers
Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Telegram, Discord, Slack, WeChat and the Google app often hide the referrer. DataBull recognises them from the browser and credits the app. (The X app on iPhone can't be told apart from Safari; add ?ref=x to links you post.)
Direct, made readable
| Bucket | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Direct · typed or bookmark | Returning visitors, or new desktop visitors who landed on your home page. |
| Direct · shared link | New visitors on a deep page or a phone with no referrer: a link from a chat, email, notes or an app that hides its origin. |
| Checkout return | Buyers coming back from the payment page. Never credited for a sale when the buyer had an earlier visit. |
Attribution models
Set per website in Settings:
- Last non-direct (default): the most recent visit with a real source.
- First touch: the visitor's first visit ever.
- Last touch: the last visit before buying.
Lifetime value
The Revenue page groups customers by the source of their first attributed payment and adds everything they've paid since: renewals, upgrades, repeat purchases. A customer is the provider's customer id, else their email.
Privacy modes
Each website picks how visitors are identified (Settings → Privacy). No code change is needed to switch.
| Mode | What happens |
|---|---|
| Cookies (default) | First-party cookies on your domain. A sale weeks later still links to the visit that produced it. |
| Cookieless | Nothing is stored in the browser. Visitors are recognised by a hash of a random daily salt, IP and browser; salts are deleted after two days. Sales link to visits from the same day only. |
| Cookieless until consent | Cookieless until your banner calls datacheap('consent', true); datacheap('consent', false) removes the cookies again. |
Bots
Crawlers, headless browsers, scripts and data-centre traffic are dropped before they're stored, and counted separately.
The bigger picture: revenue attribution, explained.