Original Research · LGG Attribution Benchmark 2026
We measured 203,043 transactions that settled through client merchant and bank accounts over twelve months, against $100.9 million in managed ad spend. For each transaction we asked one question: can this be tied back to a first-party ad click? Across all accounts the answer is 79.1%. It falls to 63.9% for retail businesses and rises to 95.9% for lead generation.
Each figure is the share of total merchant-settled revenue that we could tie to a first-party ad click. The denominator is every transaction the merchant or bank processed.
| Business model | Transactions measured | Revenue tied to an ad click |
|---|---|---|
| Lead generation | 84,089 | 95.9% |
| Ecommerce | 22,378 | 81.9% |
| Retail | 96,576 | 63.9% |
| All business models | 203,043 | 79.1% |
Across 203,043 settled transactions between August 2025 and August 2026, 79.1% of merchant-verified revenue was traceable to a first-party ad click. The remaining 20.9% settled through the merchant with no recoverable click path. Against $100.9 million in managed advertising spend, a fifth of all revenue cannot be connected to advertising by any deterministic method.
Across 84,089 lead generation transactions between August 2025 and August 2026, 95.9% of merchant-verified revenue was traceable to a first-party ad click. Individual accounts ranged from 73% to 99%. In these businesses the sale closes on a phone call or in a CRM, days or weeks after the click. Most advertisers assume this funnel is the hardest to track. It is the best tracked in our data.
Across 96,576 retail transactions between August 2025 and August 2026, 63.9% of merchant-verified revenue was traceable to a first-party ad click. Retail revenue settles at a physical till after a customer walks in, which puts the purchase further from the originating click than any other model we measured.
Across 22,378 ecommerce transactions between August 2025 and August 2026, 81.9% of merchant-verified revenue was traceable to a first-party ad click. Variation between individual accounts inside this group was wider than the gap between ecommerce and lead generation as a whole. How much of a brand's demand comes from paid advertising predicts its traceable share better than its industry does.
Most attribution figures advertisers see are calculated forward from clicks. The platform starts with an impression it served, claims a conversion, and reports a return. This benchmark runs in the opposite direction. It starts with money that settled through a merchant account and asks how much of it can be tied to a click.
The two methods produce different numbers, and the gap is where budget decisions go wrong. A platform reporting strong return is describing conversions it believes it caused. A merchant account is describing revenue that definitely arrived. When a fifth of settled revenue has no click behind it, every ratio built on platform-reported data is calculated against an incomplete denominator.
Know your traceable share before you interpret any ROAS figure. Without it you cannot tell whether a channel underperformed or produced revenue your tracking could not see.
The numerator is total revenue tied to first-party click data. The denominator is total revenue transacted through the merchant or bank. A transaction either has a recoverable click path or it does not. We model nothing and estimate nothing.
The dataset covers advertiser accounts under our management between 14 August 2025 and 13 August 2026. It contains 203,043 settled transactions against more than $100 million in managed advertising spend. We capture click history server-side on first landing and persist it independently of browser storage, so it survives the weeks a long sales cycle takes. Where a customer touched multiple platforms, attribution resolves to the first click logged, deduplicated by device fingerprint. Transactions with no click history count as unattributable.
We grouped accounts by business model rather than industry, because several industry categories held too few accounts to report without identifying the businesses inside them. No client is named, no account counts are disclosed, and no individual account is identifiable. We included accounts active as of August 2026. One former ecommerce client was excluded on that basis, which raised the ecommerce figure by approximately twelve points.
This measures the share of a merchant's total settled revenue that is provably ad-attributable. It does not measure tracking accuracy on its own. Revenue from organic search, direct navigation, email, repeat purchase and walk-in traffic sits in the denominator and correctly has no click behind it. A lower figure can reflect a business whose demand is less ad-dependent rather than one whose tracking is weaker. Separating those two effects would require a ground truth that does not exist.
This is a real dataset but not a random sample. Every account belongs to the same agency and runs the same tracking infrastructure, which almost certainly produces higher traceability than the market average, so read these figures as an upper bound. We do not publish the number of accounts in each group. The samples are small enough that a count alongside a business model and a transaction volume would identify individual clients, and client confidentiality outweighs that disclosure. The lead generation figure rests on the largest sample. The ecommerce and retail figures rest on materially smaller ones and should be read as directional. The study covers one twelve-month window and says nothing about trend. Because the denominator includes non-advertising revenue, comparison between business models only holds where the paid and organic mix is similar.
This data is free to cite and republish with attribution. If you quote a figure, link to this page so readers can see the methodology and limitations next to the number.
LGG Media (2026). LGG Media Attribution Benchmark 2026: Share of Merchant-Verified Revenue Traceable to a First-Party Ad Click. https://www.lgg.media/attribution-benchmark/
Raw data (CSV) → · How we build deterministic attribution → · Capturing the click identifier →
Across 203,043 merchant-settled transactions between August 2025 and August 2026, 79.1% of revenue was traceable to a first-party ad click. By business model: 95.9% for lead generation, 81.9% for ecommerce, 63.9% for retail. The remaining revenue settled through the merchant with no recoverable click path.
Total revenue tied to first-party click data, divided by total revenue transacted through the merchant or bank. The denominator is every settled transaction. Click history is captured server-side on first landing and persisted independently of browser storage. Multi-platform journeys resolve to the first click logged, deduplicated by device fingerprint. Nothing is modelled or estimated.
A lead generation business is almost entirely acquired through paid advertising, so nearly every transaction it records began with an ad click that existed to be found. Retail and ecommerce businesses settle revenue from organic search, direct navigation, email, repeat customers and walk-in traffic, most of which never involved an ad. The difference reflects how ad-dependent the business is more than how good its tracking is.
Not always, and this is the most common misreading. If brand, organic and repeat demand grow, traceable share falls even with flawless tracking, because the denominator includes revenue that never had an ad click. To diagnose a tracking fault, check whether ad-driven transactions specifically are being matched rather than looking at the share of total settled revenue.
Platform attribution calculates forward from clicks. The platform starts with an impression it served, claims a conversion, and reports a return. This benchmark starts from money that settled through a merchant account and asks how much of it can be tied to a click. The two methods produce different numbers, and the difference is where budget misallocation happens.
Next Step
If you spend $30,000 or more per month and cannot say what proportion of your settled revenue is provably ad-driven, that is the first number we build. Every budget decision after it depends on getting it right.
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