What is Reconciliation?
Reconciliation is the process of matching the e-commerce data from the client's system with Google Analytics data using Order IDs.
Reconciliation ensures that every eCommerce sale and conversion is accurately reflected in Fospha data, even when Google Analytics (GA) fails to track certain transactions (e.g., due to cookie consent banners).
By matching customer eCommerce platform orders (e.g., Shopify, Magento) with GA data via Order IDs, we isolate any unmatched transactions and redistribute them across your marketing channels.
Why We Built It | What Problem Does It Solve?
Cookie consent limitations and other tracking gaps can lead GA to underreport conversions by 10–30%—or more in some regions. This approach overcomes the limitations of cookie-based tracking by ensuring that 100% of your sales and conversions are included, offering a reliable basis for further attribution.
Reconciliation closes that gap by incorporating 100% of your actual eCommerce sales data into Fospha. This not only ensures consistency between your internal sales figures and Fospha’s attribution but also lays the foundation for more accurate modeling.
How It Works.
1. Isolating the Transactions
Fospha pulls order data directly from your eCommerce platform (e.g., Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce), matching each Order ID to the corresponding transaction in Google Analytics.
Transactions that cannot be matched to GA—often caused by missing cookies or blocked trackers—are isolated as “unmatched.”
These unmatched conversions are set aside in a “reconciliation table” before entering any machine learning (ML) attribution processes.
2. Calculating the Channel Mix Coefficient
After modelling your visits, Fospha determines the percentage share of conversions attributed to each channel group (e.g., email, paid search, social).
For example, if 30 out of 100 recorded GA conversions in a given period came from email, email’s channel mix coefficient is 30% (0.3).
3. Reconciliation
The unmatched transactions identified in step 1 are now redistributed based on each channel’s coefficient.
Suppose there were 10 unmatched transactions. If email’s channel mix coefficient is 0.3, then email receives 3 of those 10 unmatched conversions.
By default, Fospha reconciles to the “Online Store” data for Shopify. This ensures that total conversions in Fospha should match the "Online Store" sales channel data in Shopify, along with any conversions tracked in GA—even if they aren’t part of the “Online Store” sales channel.
If you use additional sales channels (e.g., App), those can also be reconciled if you have them set up in Fospha.