Blog content is the easiest channel to underrate. Someone finds your guide on how to descale an espresso machine, reads it, leaves, and comes back two weeks later through a Meta ad or a branded search to buy. Last-click attribution gives the article nothing. Shopify’s own reports lump the whole thing into organic search, which mixes people who searched for your brand name with people who found you through content. If you are deciding whether to keep paying a writer, neither view helps much.
Split branded from non-branded search
The first fix is free. In Google Search Console, filter queries that contain your brand name and look at them separately from everything else. Branded search is demand you created somewhere else, through ads, word of mouth, packaging or press. Non-branded search is where your content and product pages are earning new attention. If non-branded clicks to blog posts are growing, the content is doing its job at the top of the funnel even if it rarely closes a sale directly.
Then look at which landing pages those non-branded clicks hit. A blog post that ranks for a problem your product solves is worth far more than one that ranks for a loosely related topic. The second kind can bring a lot of traffic and almost no buyers.
Look at first touch, not last touch
Content mostly starts journeys. To see that, you need a report that credits the first visit or spreads credit across visits. In GA4, the landing page report and path exploration show where buying sessions began, though GA4 has its own limits for e-commerce attribution. A dedicated attribution tool with a longer lookback window will show the blog visit as a first or assisting touch on orders that closed through another channel. I made the broader case in why last-click attribution punishes top of funnel.
Lookback length matters here. A 7-day window will miss most content-started journeys for anything other than impulse buys. If your products take a couple of weeks of consideration, you want 30 days at minimum, and longer for high-priced items.
Ask buyers
A post-purchase survey with separate answers for “Google search” and “an article or blog post” will give you a rough share of buyers who remember content as the reason they found you. People are bad at remembering exact paths, but they are reasonably good at remembering whether they first read something or first saw an ad. Add an answer for AI assistants like ChatGPT too. A growing share of first-time buyers in some categories now say an AI answer sent them, and that traffic often arrives as direct or referral with no useful source.
Tag internal links from content to products
You don’t need UTMs on internal links, and adding them can break session attribution in some tools. What you do want is a clean way to see which posts send readers to product pages. In GA4 or Shopify, check next-page paths from your top blog posts. If a post gets thousands of visits and almost nobody clicks through to a product, the content may be ranking for the wrong intent, or the product link is buried.
Where ThoughtMetric fits
ThoughtMetric uses multi-touch attribution with a lookback window up to 90 days, so a blog session that starts a journey ending in a paid or branded click gets partial credit instead of none. (Disclosure: ThoughtMetric sponsors this site.) Its post-purchase survey runs alongside the pixel data, which helps with the content and AI assistant answers described above. Pricing is based on monthly pageviews, starting at $99 a month for 50,000 pageviews, with every feature included. Keep in mind that pageview pricing means a high-traffic blog raises your bill, so check your blog’s share of sitewide pageviews before you pick a plan.
A sensible scorecard for content
I track four numbers monthly for content. Non-branded clicks from Search Console. Click-through from blog posts to product pages. Orders where a blog post appears as a touch in the attribution tool, using multi-touch or first-touch credit. And the survey share for “article or blog” plus “AI assistant”. None of these is the answer alone. Together they tell you whether content is growing the top of your funnel and whether those readers eventually buy.
Expect the numbers to move slowly. Content that ranks today may not show up in orders for a quarter, which is why judging it on last month’s last-click revenue almost always leads to cutting it too early. If most of your content-assisted orders land as direct visits, the reasons are covered in attributing direct traffic sales.
Picking an approach
- Only using Shopify’s organic search number? Split branded and non-branded queries in Search Console first.
- Judging content on last-click revenue? Switch to first-touch or multi-touch views with at least a 30-day lookback.
- Want a direct signal from buyers? Add “article or blog” and “AI assistant” to your survey answers.
- Seeing traffic but no product clicks? Check next-page paths from your top posts.
- Want multi-touch credit and survey answers in one place? ThoughtMetric (our sponsor) covers both.
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