Attribution
Triple Whale vs Northbeam
Triple Whale suits stores under roughly $5m a year: affordable, quick to install on Shopify, and it doubles as a daily operations dashboard. Northbeam suits bigger spenders who want media-mix modelling and will pay for accuracy on where incremental revenue comes from.
- No affiliate links
- Public pricing only
- Updated by hand
Apple's App Tracking Transparency in 2021 broke the old attribution model, and both tools exist to patch it: first-party pixels, post-purchase surveys and modelling to reconstruct which ad drove which order.
Neither gives you truth. They give you a consistent methodology you can make decisions against, which is a different and more achievable thing.
Side by side
Triple Whale and Northbeam in short.
Triple Whale
Ecommerce analytics and attribution built around Shopify, with a daily operations dashboard.
- Free
- Free trial.
- Paid from
- From roughly $129/month, scaling with order volume
Good at
- Installs on Shopify quickly and shows a useful dashboard on day one
- Post-purchase survey feature adds a self-reported attribution signal
- Covers profit, creative reporting and forecasting, not just attribution
Weak at
- Modelling is less sophisticated than Northbeam's
- Costs rise with order volume
Northbeam
Attribution and media-mix modelling for larger direct-to-consumer advertisers.
- Free
- None; sales-led onboarding.
- Paid from
- Typically four figures a month
Good at
- Machine-learning attribution and media-mix modelling aimed at incrementality
- Handles complex multi-channel spend across Meta, Google, TikTok and more
- Strong for teams whose decisions move six-figure budgets
Weak at
- Expensive and requires onboarding
- Overkill under about $250k a month in ad spend
The differences
Where they actually diverge.
Pick one
Which one fits you.
Choose Triple Whale if
- You run a Shopify store and want one dashboard the team checks daily
- Budget is thousands, not tens of thousands, a month
- You want profit and creative reporting alongside attribution
Choose Northbeam if
- You spend enough that a 5% reallocation is real money
- You need incrementality, not last-click
- An analyst will own the tool
When neither is the answer
Under about £10k a month in ad spend, use the ad platforms' own reporting plus a post-purchase 'how did you hear about us' question. That survey answer is often the most useful attribution data a small store has.
Questions
Common questions.
Why don't the numbers match Meta Ads Manager?
They never will. Meta counts view-through and click conversions in its own window, using its own identity graph. Attribution tools use your first-party data and a different window. Pick one source for decisions and stop reconciling.
Do post-purchase surveys work?
They're directionally useful and cheap. People misremember, and brand channels get over-credited, but the trend over months tells you when a channel starts mattering.
Prices are list prices published by each vendor and change often — check the linked pricing pages before you buy. We take no affiliate commission and nobody pays to appear here.
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