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When a recipient places an order, the sale is associated with the campaign history using an optimistic algorithm. The Autoresponder will attempt to capture every sale made, which includes sales generated without the email links. For example, if a recipient receives an email, opens his/her browser, uses a favorite to navigate to your site, and then makes a purchase. Such an event will carry no tracking ids to associate the purchase with a campaign. The optimistic algorithm will do a check after the order is placed to look for a matching email addresses address to associate the sale. The Autoresponder will look for the most recent, non Failure EMAIL step containing a history record for the recipient and associate the order with that history record.
Tip: It is possible for the wrong association to be made. One scenario would be multiple campaigns sending emails to a recipient and the recipient makes a purchase based on the earlier email. In this case, the Autoresponder will incorrectly associate the sale with the most recent email. This would be a mistake, but as far as mistakes go, this is nothing near the magnitude of Caddyshack 2, eh?
However, this will probably not be a problem for the following reasons:
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