What Drove the Change

What Drove the Change ranks the parts of your store that moved your sales the most, compared with an earlier period. Ask Copilot why sales rose or fell and it answers with this ranking. Pulse uses the same analysis when it writes its weekly and monthly story.

Each line is one cut of your orders, such as a country or a traffic source, with the amount it added or took away. The lines are ranked by how much they moved, not by their share of a total.

How It Works

The Lenses

Copilot cuts your orders along these lenses:

  • Traffic Source: the utm_source on the order, such as google or email.
  • Traffic Medium: the utm_medium on the order.
  • Country: the billing country.
  • Customer Type: new for a customer’s first order ever, returning for any later order. Guest checkouts count as returning.

It can also cut by campaign (the utm_campaign on the order) and by payment status when you ask. An order with no UTM tag reads Untagged. An order with no billing country reads Unknown.

Pulse uses the first 4 lenses.

Ranking the Lines

Each lens is analyzed on its own. Within a lens, every order belongs to one value: an order has one billing country. Each line shows the change in sales for one value, such as Country and United Kingdom.

Lines are ranked by how far they moved, largest first, whether up or down. A value that didn’t move isn’t listed. When a source and a medium cover exactly the same orders, they share one line, such as Traffic Source · Traffic Medium.

Every Line Is a Separate Lens

The lines don’t add up to the total change, and none is a share of it. An order from the United Kingdom is also an order from a source, so the same order is counted in a Country line and in a Traffic Source line.

Read each line on its own: how much that cut moved, not how much of the change it explains.

Asking Copilot

Ask a question such as “Why did sales drop last week?” or “What drove the change in orders this month?”. Copilot compares the period you name with the period of the same length right before it.

It answers with a table titled What Drove the Change. Its columns are:

  • Dimension: the lens.
  • Segment: the value within that lens.
  • Contribution: the change in the measure, up or down.
  • Relative Change: the change as a percentage. It’s blank when the segment had no sales in the earlier period, since growth from nothing has no percentage.

The table lists up to 30 lines. Copilot can explain a change in any of these measures:

  • Total Sales, which is before returns
  • Gross Sales, which is line items before discounts and returns
  • Net Sales, which takes refunds off
  • Orders
  • Items

Total Sales here is line items, less discounts, plus shipping and any tax not already in your prices. A refund can’t be traced to the cut that made the sale, so Total Sales leaves refunds out. That’s why it can differ from the Total Sales on a report.

Canceled orders, and orders whose payment was voided or expired, don’t count. Each answer uses a message from your monthly allowance. See Copilot.

How Pulse Uses It

For each weekly and monthly summary, Pulse runs the analysis on Total Sales. A week is compared with the week before. A month is compared with the same month last year.

Pulse hands the 6 biggest lines to Copilot, which is told to explain a change with those lines and not to invent a cause. Pulse skips the analysis when either period has no orders.

What It Means for You

Start with the biggest line. It’s the place to look first, not proof of a cause: a country that fell may have lost an ad campaign, had a price change or run out of stock.

A large Untagged line often means your ads aren’t tagged. See How to Tag Your Ads with UTM Parameters.

Lines can point both ways in the same period. A rise in new customers and a fall in returning customers show up as 2 lines, not one net figure.

Check a line against a report, such as Sales by Country, before you act on it.

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