Unattributed orders

Why some orders receive no ad credit, how to tell a real organic sale from a tracking gap, and what to fix in each case.

An unattributed order is one Clakta recorded but could not credit to any ad. It counts fully in your revenue; it just contributes nothing to any campaign's performance.

Some unattributed orders are correct — genuinely organic sales. Others are tracking gaps that make your paid channels look worse than they are. This article is about telling them apart.

Why an order ends up unattributed

An order has no eligible touchpoint when:

The visitor never clicked an ad. Direct, organic search, email, word of mouth. Correct and expected.
The ad was not tagged. The click happened but carried no clkt parameter, so it was recorded as an ordinary visit.
The click fell outside the window. More than 7 days passed between the click and the purchase.
The order was not linked to its session. The tracking context never made it from the browser to the Orders API.
The session could not be recomputed. Privacy-friendly project, and the IP / User-Agent sent with the order did not match the ones seen during browsing.

Only the first is a real answer. The rest are fixable.

Diagnosing

Work down the list — each check rules out one cause.

Is the ad tagged?

Open Project settings → Ad accounts and look at the UTMs configured count for each account. Anything short of full coverage means untagged ads are producing untraceable clicks.

Click one of your own live ads and confirm the landing URL carries a resolved clkt value with numeric ids.

Fix: Tag your ad URLs.

Does the order carry tracking context?

Open an unattributed order in Orders and inspect its tracking section.

clkt present, no campaign matched — the value arrived malformed, or the ids do not belong to a connected account. Check that the ad account is connected and enabled.
clkt empty but UTMs present — the ad was tagged with UTMs only. The clkt key is a separate parameter and must be added alongside them.
Everything empty — your backend is not forwarding the tracking object at all. See Send orders from your server.

Is the session matching?

In full attribution projects, confirm your backend sends sessionId.

In privacy-friendly projects, confirm you are sending the shopper's ip and raw userAgent — not your server's, and not a trimmed or normalized User-Agent string. This is the single most common cause of orders that carry a clkt but still match no session.

If your backend sends its own IP and User-Agent, every order gets a fresh anonymous identity and matches nothing. Revenue looks fine, attribution looks broken, and nothing in the UI points at the cause.

Is your sales cycle longer than the window?

If clicks are landing correctly but old journeys keep expiring, the window is the constraint rather than your tracking. See Attribution windows.

There is no universal target — a brand with strong organic demand will always have a large legitimate unattributed share. What matters is the trend.

Stable over time — probably your real organic baseline
Jumped suddenly — something broke. Correlate the date with an ad launch, a site deploy, a consent banner change or a tracking mode switch
Near 100% — tracking is not working at all; start at the top of this article

Note your unattributed share once tracking is verified and treat that as your baseline. Alert on deviations from it rather than chasing an absolute number.

Things that are not tracking failures

Ad blockers. A meaningful share of visitors block analytics entirely. Their orders arrive through your server and are correctly unattributed.
Cross-device journeys in privacy-friendly mode. Phone research, desktop purchase. Expected behaviour for the mode, not a bug.
Genuinely organic sales. Returning customers, direct traffic and word of mouth should be unattributed. Attributing them to ads would be the error.

How attribution works

What a touchpoint is, how Clakta walks back from an order to the ads that caused it, and why its numbers never match what the ad platforms report.

Attribution models

The six models Clakta offers, exactly how each splits credit, and which one to use for the decision you are actually making.

Attribution windows

How long a click or a view stays eligible to receive credit, and what that means when your sales cycle is longer than the window.