Ad tracking
Litestore recognizes visitors who arrive from your ads and credits their orders to the ad platform that sent them.
Litestore doesn't connect to your ad accounts or import ad spend from them. What it does is recognize visitors who arrive from an ad, store which platform sent them and record that platform on their order. The reports then show how much revenue each ad platform brought in, using the store's own paid orders as the source.
Navigation
Orders → Source columnEvery order has a source, and the orders list shows it in the Source column. The order's detail page shows it again under the customer. The assistant also reports sales by source when you ask, with the net revenue and the number of orders for each source.
The ad platforms report their own conversions in their own dashboards. Litestore doesn't read those numbers and doesn't try to match them. It records which platform sent each paid order, and the two sets of numbers stay separate.
Tracking setup
There's nothing to connect in Litestore. Tracking starts as soon as your ads send visitors to the store with a click id or UTM tags. Litestore recognizes these click ids:
gclid Google Ads
fbclid Meta Ads
ttclid TikTok Ads
msclkid Microsoft AdsGoogle Ads adds gclid when auto-tagging is on in your Google Ads account, and Meta adds fbclid to links on its own. If a platform doesn't add a click id, tag your landing URLs with utm_medium=cpc or another paid medium, so Litestore can still tell the visit was paid.
Visit attribution
When a visitor lands on any page of the store, Litestore copies the click id and the UTM tags from the URL into first-party cookies. The cookies last for 90 days, which covers the usual ad-platform lookback window.
Last-click attribution
If the visitor comes back through a newer ad, the new click id replaces the old one. A click from a different platform also clears the click ids from the previous one, so a shopper who clicked a Google ad last week and a Meta ad today is credited to Meta.
Order source
When the order is paid, Litestore looks at the stored values and picks one source for it. It checks them in this order and uses the first one that applies.
| Signal | Source on the order |
|---|---|
| A click id | Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads or Microsoft Ads. |
A paid utm_medium such as cpc, ppc or paid_social | Google Ads for utm_source=google, Meta Ads for a social source, and Paid Search otherwise. |
| A collab's referral link | Affiliate. |
utm_source=email or utm_medium=email | Email. |
A social utm_source such as instagram or tiktok | Social. |
utm_source=google or bing, or utm_medium=organic | Organic Search. |
Any other utm_source | The source as written. |
| A campaign link and nothing else | Campaign. |
| Nothing | Direct. |
Revenue and conversions
Litestore calculates revenue per source from the orders that carry it. It converts them into the base currency and subtracts refunds. The ad platform counts conversions with its own rules and its own attribution window, so the two numbers often differ.
Conversion events
When an order is paid, the store's server can send the purchase event straight to Meta through the Conversions API, to Google Analytics through the Measurement Protocol and to PostHog. Because the event comes from the server, the platforms still receive purchases from shoppers whose browsers block tracking scripts.
A visit without a click id or tags counts as unpaid
If an ad's landing URL has no click id and no paid utm_medium, Litestore
can't tell the visit came from an ad. The order is credited to whatever
other signal it finds, which is usually Direct or the plain UTM source.
Campaigns and ads
Litestore doesn't link ads to campaigns, and a campaign's cost only includes collab commission. To count an ad's orders in a campaign, send the ad to one of the campaign's tracked links, because the link sets the campaign on the visitor's order.
Landing pages
Litestore can't stop an ad that points at a product customers can't buy, because it has no access to the ad accounts. Before you launch one, check that the landing product is published and in stock, so you aren't paying for visitors who arrive at a product they can't order.