What's the difference between Organic vs Unattributed?

Organic traffic typically refers to direct visits to your site, such as typing your URL, clicking a bookmark, or visiting through an untagged link. While this traffic can be valuable, it follows specific attribution rules in Northbeam:

• No credit if any upper-funnel touchpoints (like Paid Ads) exist in the customer's journey
• It can receive credit if:
  • It is the only touchpoint in the journey or
  • Other touchpoints are lower-funnel (eg, Retargeting Ads).

On the other hand, Unattributed refers to website traffic or purchases that cannot be linked to a specific marketing channel, campaign, or traffic source. This means that Northbeam knows that a conversion happened but does not have enough data to determine what drove it.

Here are the common causes of Unattributed data:

• Recurring subscription shipments that began before Northbeam tracking
• Manually created orders (e.g., Draft orders, Wholesale orders).
• Third-party checkouts or marketplaces (e.g. Walmart, CheckoutChamp, Tapcart).

Both Organic and Unattributed data play a role in understanding the complete customer's journey. Northbeam is built to track and attribute as much as possible using first-party data, but certain cases involving legacy systems or external platforms can result in gaps.

As mentioned previously, we monitor the Unattributed data threshold for each account and work closely with you to identify, explain, and minimize these blind posts whenever possible.