Revenue Attribution

Revenue attribution connects the payments your customers make to the marketing that brought them to your site. Once your payments reach Spreeflo, every campaign, journey, email, web push, form and traffic source shows what it earned, not just how many people opened or clicked it.

What is revenue attribution?

A customer rarely buys on their first visit. They might find you through a Google search, come back a week later from your newsletter, and finally pay after clicking a web push. Revenue attribution looks at the visits a buyer made before paying and decides how much of the payment each of those visits earned. The credit then rolls up to whatever sent that visit: a channel, a source, a UTM campaign, or a Spreeflo campaign, journey, email or notification.

Spreeflo needs two things to do this:

Why it matters

Opens, clicks and visitors tell you what got attention. Revenue tells you what paid off. With attribution in place you can:

How it works

Attribution happens in three steps:

Only visits that arrived through a channel count as touches. Direct visits (typed URLs, bookmarks) don't earn credit, so a payment with no earlier channel visit in the window shows up as Direct. Returning from a checkout page on Stripe, PayPal, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar or Dodo Payments also counts as Direct, so the payment page never takes credit for the sale.

Only clicks earn credit. An email that was opened but never clicked, or a web push that was delivered but not tapped, earns no revenue. The recipient has to land on your site from the message.

Attribution models

Choose a model in Web Analytics > Settings > Attribution. The model decides how a payment is split between the visits before it.

Under Linear, a visit's share of a payment also counts as a share of an order, so a campaign can show fractional orders such as 2.5. The model in use is shown as a chip next to revenue in Web Analytics.

Lookback window

The lookback window, also in Web Analytics > Settings > Attribution, sets how far back a visit can be and still earn credit: 7, 30 (the default) or 90 days. With a 30-day window, a purchase on January 30 can be credited to visits from January 1 to 30. A longer window suits considered purchases and B2B, while a shorter one keeps credit on the campaigns that drove the decision.

Credit is calculated when you open a report, so a change to the model or window shows up in your past revenue as well as new revenue.

Attributed and influenced revenue

Spreeflo reports two kinds of revenue, depending on whether the touchpoint brings people to your site or lives on it.

Connect a payment provider

If you take payments with Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy or Polar, connect it once and payments flow in automatically. Revenue settings are per audience, so connect each audience that has its own website and payments.

Spreeflo creates the webhook in your provider account for you and checks the signature of every event it receives. You don't need to copy a webhook URL anywhere. Disconnecting stops tracking right away and removes the webhook.

Each payment is recorded as a purchase event, before tax, from the moment you connect. Webhook retries and duplicate events for the same payment are recorded once. In the same tab, the Currency card sets the currency your revenue is reported in (see Currency).

Link payments to visits

Connecting a provider brings your revenue in. To credit each payment to the visits before it, pass the visitor's Spreeflo IDs into the payment's metadata under the keys spreelytics_visitor_id and spreelytics_session_id. Read them in the browser when the visitor clicks to pay, and send them to your server with the checkout request:

// In the browser, when the visitor clicks to pay
const ids = {};
const visitorId = Spreelytics.getVisitorId();
const sessionId = Spreelytics.getSessionId();
if (visitorId) ids.spreelytics_visitor_id = visitorId;
if (sessionId) ids.spreelytics_session_id = sessionId;
// Send `ids` to your server along with the checkout request

Where the IDs go depends on how you take the payment:

A Stripe Checkout session for a one-time payment, created on your server with the IDs from the browser:

const session = await stripe.checkout.sessions.create({
  mode: 'payment',
  line_items: [{ price: 'price_123', quantity: 1 }],
  success_url: 'https://example.com/thanks',
  metadata: ids,
  payment_intent_data: { metadata: ids },
});

A Paddle checkout, opened in the browser:

Paddle.Checkout.open({
  items: [{ priceId: 'pri_123', quantity: 1 }],
  customData: ids,
});

Other payment providers (Revenue API)

Use the Revenue API if you bill through a provider that isn't listed (PayPal, Chargebee, Recurly, Shopify, a bank transfer, your own billing system) or record deals closed by hand. It's the Other option on the Revenue tab. You send each payment from your server, usually from the webhook handler your billing system already calls, and Spreeflo attributes it exactly like a connected provider's payments.

Set it up

curl -X POST https://api.spreeflo.com/1.0/revenue \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "audienceId": "123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426614174000",
    "eventName": "purchase",
    "revenue": { "amount": 79.99, "currency": "USD" },
    "transactionId": "order_1042",
    "email": "jane@example.com",
    "visitorId": "vid_9f8c1c2a3d4e"
  }'

In practice you'll call it from the handler that already receives your billing system's "payment succeeded" webhook:

// Your billing system's "payment succeeded" webhook
app.post('/webhooks/billing', async (req, res) => {
  const order = req.body;

  await fetch('https://api.spreeflo.com/1.0/revenue', {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.SPREEFLO_API_KEY}`,
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      audienceId: process.env.SPREEFLO_AUDIENCE_ID,
      eventName: 'purchase',
      revenue: { amount: order.total, currency: order.currency }, // major units, before tax
      transactionId: order.id,
      email: order.customerEmail,
      visitorId: order.metadata.spreelytics_visitor_id, // saved at checkout
      sessionId: order.metadata.spreelytics_session_id,
      timestamp: order.paidAt,
    }),
  });

  res.sendStatus(200);
});

Request fields

Unknown fields are rejected, so send only the fields above. The full reference is under Revenue in the API Reference.

Record refunds

Send the original transactionId again with refunded: true and a positive amount, never a negative one. With a refundId, the amount is that one refund, which lets you record several partial refunds. Without one, the amount is the total refunded so far. A refund can never exceed the original payment.

{
  "audienceId": "123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426614174000",
  "eventName": "purchase",
  "revenue": { "amount": 20.00, "currency": "USD" },
  "transactionId": "order_1042",
  "refunded": true,
  "refundId": "refund_77"
}

Responses

A successful call returns the transactionId and a message saying what happened:

How payments are matched

Whichever way a payment arrives, Spreeflo ties it to a person in this order:

A payment is never rejected for missing IDs. Passing the visitor ID gives the most accurate results, especially for buyers who never gave you their email before paying.

Currency

Payments keep their original amount and currency, and are also converted into your audience's reporting currency at that day's exchange rate. Set the reporting currency in the Currency card on the Revenue tab (USD by default). You can change it once a day. All existing revenue is then re-converted, and Web Analytics shows a notice until that finishes.

Where to see revenue in Spreeflo

Revenue shows up next to the numbers you already use to make decisions. Until an audience has recorded a payment, revenue columns show — and a tooltip on how to turn tracking on.

Web Analytics

Campaigns and journeys

The Campaigns & Journeys list has Revenue and Orders columns for each channel. On the Email and Web push tabs they show attributed revenue from clicks. On the Forms tab they show influenced revenue from the campaign's popups. A campaign's report shows an Attributed revenue tile with its orders, and a row's Analytics action opens Web Analytics on that campaign's UTM breakdown in revenue mode.

Emails and web push

The Marketing emails, Transactional emails and Web push lists show a Revenue figure for each template. Its tooltip adds orders and revenue per recipient. Because revenue is counted per template, you can compare subject lines, designs and offers by what they earned.

Transactional emails (receipts, onboarding, shipping updates) are credited only for links that point at your tracked website, so links to other sites, like password resets and file downloads, are never changed. Turn this off for a template with Credit revenue to this email in the template settings.

Forms and popups

The Forms list has a Revenue column showing influenced revenue: purchases by people within your lookback window after they submitted the form. Its tooltip also covers people who only viewed it. Use it to see which lead magnets and signup forms bring in buyers, not just leads.

Contacts

Each contact's profile has a Revenue card with their lifetime revenue after refunds, purchases, average order value, amount refunded, and first and last purchase dates. In their activity timeline, each purchase shows its amount and a Credited to line naming the campaign or channel whose visit earned it.

Home

The recent activity card on Home has a Revenue column for your latest campaigns and journeys.

AI assistants

Through the Spreeflo MCP server, Claude, ChatGPT and other AI clients can read revenue as well. Campaign and web push performance include revenue and orders, and traffic breakdowns include revenue per channel or source. You can ask something like "which of last month's campaigns earned the most per recipient?"

Decisions you can make with revenue

Troubleshooting

Need Immediate Help? Contact our support team at support@spreeflo.com or check our other guides for more information.