Our Attribution Adventure
"We were tracking way more sessions and revenue in Kickbite, which matched our hunch that the truth lies somewhere between GA4 and Meta’s numbers"
About five months ago, after a long selection process, we chose a new attribution tool. We don’t trust GA4 at all anymore—but what do you replace it with? Here’s how we picked ours, what we’ve learned so far, the challenges we faced, and what’s still ahead.
Onboarding
Last summer, after a deep search, we decided to build our marketing channel attribution with Kickbite. I wrapped everything up right before my vacation, and by the time I got back, almost everything was set up. 😆 We had so much data to load that Kickbite immediately had to restructure their database (kinda proud we broke things right away). This delayed some product-level insights, but it wasn’t a big deal for us at the time.
First Surprises
After the first month of data, we saw huge differences compared to GA4—especially with Social Paid. We were tracking way more sessions and revenue in Kickbite, which matched our hunch that the truth lies somewhere between GA4 and Meta’s numbers.
But SEO revenue was underperforming in Kickbite. Why? Because Kickbite treated SEO as a passive channel by default. For us, SEO is a core investment, so we worked with Kickbite to adjust the attribution model. By December, the numbers looked completely different.
How We Use the Tool
- Optimizing campaigns: Kickbite helped us fine-tune Social Paid, making it as profitable as SEA.
- Company-wide adoption: Unlike our old GA4 dashboards, Kickbite’s data updates instantly—so everyone from the CEO to social media managers uses it daily.
- Budget shifts: Because of Kickbite’s insights, we’ve moved more budget into Display and Social Paid.
Working with Kickbite
The collaboration has been great. They actually listen and make changes when needed. For example:
- They adjusted their attribution model after we (and they) felt view-through conversions were overvalued.
- We now see profitability per channel because Kickbite pulls data from our warehouse (and we can link it to daily targets).
- We even feel involved in their roadmap, with quarterly meetings to discuss priorities.
Results
Challenges & Wishes
It’s not perfect yet. Our biggest frustrations?
- The date picker resets on every page (people get so mad about this 😆).
- No returns data—we still have to check Looker Studio for that.
- Some features (like customer retention and product sales tracking) are underused because we just haven’t had time.
Tips If You’re Choosing a Tool
- Find a partner, not just a vendor—talk to other users first.
- Question the numbers—dig deep to understand how data is tracked.
- More features ≠ better—you’ll probably only use a few.
- Think about who’ll use it—ad specialists need different things than execs.
Results (Because ROI Matters)
- TikTok Ads (NL): Now driving 3.3% of total revenue (thanks to Kickbite’s insights).
- Caught a pricing error: Found products listed for €0 in our shop and fixed it within hours.
- Increased Google Ads remarketing by 50%—sessions grew just as fast.
- Cut Social Paid in France—we weren’t using the right content to make it profitable.
Final Thought?
Attribution isn’t magic—it’s about finding a tool that fits, questioning the data, and acting on it. Kickbite’s been that for us.
