What is attributed margin?

Attributed margin is the portion of order contribution margin — revenue minus cost of goods, shipping and any marketplace fees — that an attribution model credits to a channel. It is the money-you-keep version of attributed revenue, and the numerator of every true-ROAS figure in the app.

Formula

attributed margin (channel, model) = Σ order contribution margin × credit share

Worked example

An order books €200 of revenue and €76 of contribution margin after €110 COGS and €14 shipping. Under linear across a three-touch journey, each channel is credited €25.33 of margin. A channel that mostly touches orders like this one will show healthy attributed revenue and thin attributed margin — visible here, invisible in any revenue-based report.

How Saldo Metrics computes it

The engine takes each order's contribution margin from v_contribution_margin — built from the order's *_base line revenue, COGS, shipping cost and any marketplace fees, all EUR at the order's own dates — and splits it across the order's journey exactly as it splits revenue: same touches, same shares, per model, written to fact_attribution as attributed_margin_eur. Two exclusions keep the figure honest. Cancelled orders, and orders refunded in full, never enter. And uncosted orders are dropped entirely rather than attributed zero margin — counting them at zero would make a channel that happens to sell uncosted SKUs look like a money-loser. A touch is any UTM-tagged visit in the 30 days before the purchase; orders with none credit organic in full, and so does credit given to a touch the engine cannot tie to an ad (unpaid social visits go to their own organic social row instead). A touch is tied to an ad when its utm_campaign / utm_content name a campaign or ad from a connected ad account (by name or platform id), or, failing that, when utm_source is an ad platform and utm_medium marks a paid click (Google Analytics' paid mediums: anything containing cp such as cpc, cpm or cpa, ppc, paid…, retargeting, plus display, advertising and the like); the latter credits the channel without a campaign. v_channel_attribution sums per channel and model; dividing by channel spend there is what produces true ROAS.

Why it matters

Ad spend is paid out of margin, not revenue. Two channels with identical attributed revenue can differ several-fold in attributed margin once basket composition and discounting differ — and the channel budget that maximizes revenue is routinely the wrong one for profit. This column is where that difference first becomes visible.

Common mistakes

  • Comparing attributed margin across models as one number. Model choice moves margin between channels just as it moves revenue; fix the model before comparing channels.
  • Ignoring cost coverage. Because uncosted orders are excluded, a channel selling many uncosted SKUs shows less attributed margin than it really earns. Improving product cost coverage improves this figure's completeness.
  • Reading attributed margin as incremental profit. It allocates the margin of orders that happened; whether those orders would have happened without the ad is an incrementality question the MMM views address.

Where you see this in the app

Marketing → Attribution, as the attributed margin column of the true-ROAS table (under the model selected at the top of the Marketing page) and as the per-model columns of the model comparison — and, divided by spend, as every true-ROAS figure.