Sales by Marketing Referral Source

Sales by Marketing Referral Source shows your sales grouped by where Shopify says each customer came from on the visit that led to the order, such as google or facebook.

How It’s Calculated

The table has one row for each referral source. The row with the most orders is first.

The page has no chart. A pinned dashboard card of this report shows the 10 sources with the most Total Sales, plus the (no source recorded) row if you have one.

The columns are:

• Referral Source: Shopify’s name for where the visit came from, in lowercase. direct means the visit had no referrer.
• Orders: the number of orders placed.
• Average Order Value: the source’s sales before returns, divided by its orders.
• Gross Sales: each item’s price times its quantity, before discounts, shipping, tax and returns.
• Total Sales: Gross Sales minus Discounts, plus Shipping and Tax, minus money refunded in the date range.

The source is Shopify’s own record of the customer’s last visit before the order. It doesn’t depend on UTM tags, so it’s a way to check what Sales by Marketing Source shows.

The (No Source Recorded) Row

An order Shopify recorded no visit for is in the (no source recorded) row. That includes orders with no browser visit to attribute, such as point of sale, phone, draft and marketplace orders. It isn’t the same as direct.

By the Numbers needs permission to read Shopify’s marketing events to record a source. Orders imported without it have none.

What Counts

• Sales count on the day the order was placed. A refund counts on the day it was made, against the source of the original order. Refunds on orders placed more than 2 years before the start of the date range aren’t counted.
• Orders that were canceled, or whose payment was voided or expired, don’t count.
• Days follow your store’s time zone, and every amount is in your store’s currency.
• Sales Channel, Segment and Filters narrow the report. There’s no comparison period.
• A source with no orders in the date range doesn’t appear.
• Every order is in a row, because orders with no source are in their own row. Refunds follow the source of the original order, so Total Sales here can differ from the Total Sales report.

What Good Looks Like

There’s no right mix. What matters is whether the sources you pay for are the ones bringing orders.

A large (no source recorded) row is normal when you sell in person or by phone. A large direct row means Shopify saw no referrer for those visits.

What to Do About It

• A paid source with few orders: compare it with what you spend on Advertising.
• A large direct row: tag your email and social links, so those orders show up in Sales by Marketing Source. How to Tag Your Ads With UTM Parameters shows how.
• Different from your UTM reports: that’s expected. This report uses Shopify’s referral source, and Sales by Marketing Source uses the utm_source tag.

Where to Find It

• Sales by Marketing Referral Source: open Reports and look under Sales.
• Sales by Marketing Source: sales by the utm_source tag.
• Sales Attributed to Marketing: sales from orders that carry any UTM tag.