Closing the gap on TikTok attribution with post-purchase surveys.

Navigating the e-commerce landscape, especially on platforms like TikTok, can be challenging. Knowing where your potential customers are first encountering your brand can drastically reshape your advertising endeavors.

Traditional ways of tracking user behavior often focus on the last point of interaction before making a purchase. In our modern, multi-platform environment, this method is becoming outdated. TikTok is rapidly emerging as a pivotal platform for brand discovery, yet many analytic tools only scratch the surface of customer interactions.

Relying on traditional attribution often significantly underestimates the true number of sales being made on social channels, and TikTok in particular.

In our own research* based on over 1 million post-purchase survey responses, we found that only 1 in 4 sales made on TikTok showed correct attribution when compared with customer survey responses.

There can be many reasons for this disparity, from an over reliance on last-touch attribution models to issues with tracking customer events accurately.

Recently, we added UTM attribution tracking to the UserLoop Post Purchase Survey platform, this lets us directly compare attribution based on traditional methods along side customer post-purchase survey responses.  

This makes it super easy for brands to get the full picture, taking into account direct feedback from customers with their overall analytics strategy, and directly comparing the 2 to identify discrepancies.

In this example UserLoop post purchase survey analytics page, we can see a breakdown of customers who answered a traditional HDYHAU survey, and TikTok is by far the most common answer, driving the most sales and with a higher AOV than Instagram.

However, when we dive into UserLoop’s UTM analytics linked to each survey response, we can see that TikTok is not even represented in the attribution metrics for customers who answered with ‘TikTok’ in the survey.

This is just one example of how how traditional attribution often underplays the role social platforms are playing in driving sales.

Having a comprehensive post purchase survey strategy is important for all ecommerce brands - but even more so for those who are using social storefronts on TikTok and other social platforms.

Tapping into genuine customer feedback, post-purchase surveys offer authentic insights, complementing traditional tracking methods. These surveys provide a more holistic view of customer interactions, revealing:

1. Brand Discovery Locations: It's common for customers to find your brand on one platform and then explore others. Understand where your brand is making the most impact to effectively allocate your budget.
2. Conversion Timeframes: Get insights into how long it typically takes a customer from brand discovery to purchase. Post-purchase surveys offer unique data, allowing for an optimized user experience by tweaking different elements.
3. Channel Effectiveness: Properly attributing and understanding customer behavior lets you make the most of your ad budget. For instance, the German clothing brand, Snocks, utilized post-purchase surveys to refine their strategy for Black Friday. They found a larger TikTok impact than traditional methods would suggest.

TikTok not only offers a platform for brands to engage consumers but, with the integration of post-purchase surveys, provides a lens to make those engagements more insightful. For Shopify store owners looking to amplify their advertising strategy and achieve superior business outcomes, it's time to delve into post-purchase surveys.

If you'd like to learn more about running surveys on TikTok - check out our comprehensive guide.

Get started with a free UserLoop account and deploy your post purchase survey in minutes - you’ll be amazed at how much you can learn about your customers.

*Based on UserLoop analysis of 1,000,000 post purchase survey responses in 2023.