Should a customer's revenue count for the source that found them forever?
19 September 2026 · by Nordva, who make Nordva Launch
The short answer
For a small subscription product, credit all of a customer's revenue to the source that first brought them, for as long as they pay, and look at it over a fixed period when you compare channels. A channel whose customers stay for two years is worth more than one whose customers leave after a month, and crediting only the first payment hides that.
Two separate questions
“Attribution window” mixes two things:
- How long after the first visit can a signup still count for that source? A person reads your post today and signs up in three weeks. Does the post get the credit?
- Which of the customer’s payments count for that source? Only the first one, or every payment while they stay?
How long a first visit can count
As long as you can still recognise the person. In practice that’s limited by how the first visit was stored:
- A first-party cookie on your site lasts as long as its expiry, unless the browser removes it earlier. Safari’s tracking prevention deletes script-set cookies after 7 days without a visit to the site (WebKit: tracking prevention).
- A source saved with the signup (the waitlist entry or your user record) lasts forever, because it’s in your database.
So record the source at signup. Then the gap between visit and payment stops mattering.
Which payments count
Count all of them. The point of comparing channels is to know where to spend more time or money, and what a channel’s customers are worth over their whole stay decides that. Two channels that each bring ten customers at $20 a month look equal on first payment; if one channel’s customers stay two years and the other’s leave after two months, they’re very different.
Two practical rules:
- Compare channels over the same period. “Revenue collected in the last 90 days from customers each channel brought” is fair between channels.
- Keep current MRR next to it. Revenue so far rewards old channels; MRR shows what each one is bringing now.
First touch stays first touch
A customer who came from a forum post and later clicked your email to pay still counts for the forum post under first touch. That’s the right default early on: it tells you where people who pay first hear about you.
With Nordva Launch
Launch credits the first touch, and doesn’t expire it: every payment a traced customer makes counts for the source of their first visit. Paying customers by source shows, per referring site (every plan with Stripe connected), the revenue collected in the period you pick and those customers’ MRR now. Signups keep their source in Launch’s database, so a payment months later still finds it. UTM groupings need Builder.
When Launch is the wrong tool
If you sell one-off products with a short buying cycle and spend heavily on ads, the ad platforms' own windows (a click within a set number of days) may be what you need to manage bids; this page is about judging channels for a subscription.
- Do you attribute the entire MRR to the original session forever?
- What attribution window should I use?
- Should I credit just the first payment to a marketing channel?