Home and garden brands lose track of 73% of word-of-mouth sales

A neighbour mentions a sofa brand over a fence in June. In August the customer buys it, on a different device, after typing the name into a
search bar. To the retailer's analytics, that sale came from nowhere.
A new study across nine retail categories finds that is the fate of
73.4% of word-of-mouth sales in home and garden, the most of any
category measured, and of roughly six in ten in apparel, food and
drink, jewellery, sports and pet.

The Zigpoll Attribution Index, published by survey and attribution
platform Zigpoll, asked 1,714,435 customers of 1,441 online merchants
how they heard about the brand immediately after purchase, then
compared each answer with the source the merchant's own analytics
recorded for that same order.

Recommendation was the hardest sale to see in every category.
Facebook, which attaches a click identifier to every visit, was the
easiest. The word-of-mouth rate exceeded the Facebook rate in all nine
verticals, by a factor of 1.20 in apparel and 1.70 in food and
beverage.

Share of word-of-mouth sales with no tracked source, with Facebook for
comparison:

- Home and garden — 73.4% word of mouth, 56.8% Facebook (175
merchants)
- Sports and outdoor — 62.4%, 42.1% (65 merchants)
- Jewellery and accessories — 60.5%, 35.8% (152 merchants)
- Food and beverage — 59.9%, 35.2% (278 merchants)
- Apparel — 59.8%, 50.0% (318 merchants)
- Pet — 59.2%, 36.7% (59 merchants)
- Beauty and personal care — 51.9%, 31.2% (190 merchants)
- Baby and kids — 50.5%, 38.1% (75 merchants)
- Supplements and health — 47.1%, 34.8% (129 merchants)

The ordering follows the purchase. Home and garden, where research
cycles run for weeks, had the highest share of orders with no source
of any kind, at 71.2%. Supplements and health, a fast repeat-purchase
category, had the lowest, at 43.3%. The longer the distance between
hearing about a brand and buying from it, the less of the journey
survives to the order.

"Every retailer has a version of this table in their head, and it is
usually wrong in the same direction," said Jason Zigelbaum, founder of
Zigpoll. "The categories where recommendation matters most are the
ones where it is least likely to survive the trip to the checkout. So
the report undercounts word of mouth precisely where it is doing the
most work. A furniture brand reading a last-click report before the
holidays is looking at a picture with seven in ten of its referred
customers cut out of it, and then setting next year's budget from what
is left."

The customers behind untracked orders were not guessing. Across the
nine categories, between 4.9% and 12.5% said they did not know or
could not remember how they had found the brand. The rest named a
channel.

The Attribution Index is published quarterly at
https://www.zigpoll.com/attribution-index. Each of the nine category
tables is published in full, all figures are free to reproduce with
attribution, and Zigpoll will provide category cuts to journalists on
request.

Methodology: Findings are drawn from 1,714,435 responses to "how did
you hear about us" questions, collected between 18 September 2025 and
18 September 2026 across 1,441 online merchants using Zigpoll.
Merchants were assigned to a category from the products appearing on
their orders; those whose product mix was ambiguous were excluded
rather than assigned. Only responses attached to a completed order
were included, so that a customer's stated answer could be compared
with the source recorded for that same order. A category is reported
only where at least 50 merchants contributed, and no channel figure
within it unless at least 25 of those merchants and 1,000 responses
stand behind it. Stores using Zigpoll are not a random sample of
retail, and the figures describe that population rather than the
market as a whole.