Where did that sale actually come from?

A sale appears in your dashboard. The useful question is not only how much it was worth. The useful question is what caused it.

Payment tools can tell you that money arrived. They rarely tell you which source introduced the buyer, which page convinced them, or which session finally pushed them over the line. That is the gap attribution is meant to close.

Begin with the transaction, not the traffic chart. A visitor path only matters when it changes a business outcome: a purchase, subscription, upgrade, renewal, or refund.

From there, work backward through customer, session, source, landing page, campaign, and the events before purchase. This keeps the investigation anchored in money instead of pageviews.

Open Attribution and sort sources by revenue. Click the source that produced the sale, then inspect the buyer path tied to that transaction.

Do not stop at the source label. The next action usually lives one layer deeper: the landing page, campaign, referrer, pricing page, goal event, or checkout session.

Look for repeated patterns across sales, not one lucky story. One buyer from a podcast is interesting. Ten buyers who first discovered you from the same podcast and later purchased after visiting pricing is a channel signal.

Also check whether direct traffic is hiding prior demand. A buyer may return directly to purchase after discovering you from search, email, or a partner link.

The biggest mistake is treating the nearest event as the cause. A checkout click did not create demand. It only finished the path.

The second mistake is treating every unattributed or direct sale as unknowable. Often the context exists earlier in the visitor history, before the final purchase session.

Scale a source when it repeatedly creates first-touch buyers and those buyers convert into payment-backed revenue. Improve a source when it attracts interested visitors who stall before checkout. Treat it as an assist when it mostly appears late in journeys started elsewhere.

The point is not perfect certainty. The point is enough continuity to choose the next growth action with confidence.