How Revenue Attribution Works

Once you've connected Stripe or Shopify, Audienceful shows revenue from email on your dashboard, on every send report, and on every automation. This page explains exactly how a sale gets credited to an email, so you know what those numbers mean.

If you want the broader background on attribution as a concept — models, windows, and how other platforms do it — see How Revenue Attribution Works in Email Marketing.

How a sale gets credited

When a paid order or payment arrives from your store or payment processor, Audienceful looks back at that contact's recent email engagement and applies these rules:

• Clicks beat opens. If the contact clicked any of your emails inside the window, a click wins the credit — even if they opened a different email more recently. A click is a deliberate human action; an open increasingly isn't.
• The most recent qualifying touch wins. Two clicks inside the window? The later one gets the sale. This is standard "last-touch" attribution, the same model Klaviyo, Omnisend, and Brevo use.
• The lookback window is 5 days by default. Measured backwards from the moment of purchase. See below for changing it.
• Bot activity is excluded. Opens and clicks we've identified as automated — inbox scanners, privacy pre-fetchers, security bots — are filtered out before attribution runs, so a machine can't win credit for a sale.
• Refunds net back automatically. A refund or cancellation reduces the attributed revenue on the original order's date, not today's, so your historical reports stay accurate. Partial refunds reduce it partially.
• Every paid order is recorded, credited or not. Purchases we can't tie back to an email still count towards your total revenue. That's what makes "% of revenue from email" a real fraction rather than an estimate.
• Orders can't be double-counted. Every purchase is keyed on its order or payment ID, so redelivered webhooks, a historical import that overlaps live traffic, or Stripe firing several events for one subscription invoice all resolve to a single order.
• Multi-currency accounts report in one currency. If you sell in several currencies, your headline revenue is reported in your primary currency rather than summing unlike amounts together.

Your attribution window

The attribution window is how long a contact's engagement stays eligible to earn credit. Important: it runs from the engagement, not from the send.

With the default 5-day window:

Five days is a common default for email and matches Klaviyo's, so numbers stay comparable if you're migrating. But the right window depends on how long your customers take to decide: a considered B2B purchase might deserve two weeks, while for impulse products anything past 24 hours is mostly noise.

The window is configurable, so it can be set to match your buying cycle rather than left on the default.

Where you'll see revenue

• Your dashboard — "Revenue from email" for the period you're viewing, with the change against the previous period. This appears once you've connected a revenue integration.
• Send reports — net attributed revenue for that individual campaign.
• Automation reports — attributed revenue for the whole flow, across every email in it. This is often the eye-opener: a welcome sequence you set up once, quietly earning in the background.
• Audiences — total spend is available as an audience condition, so you can segment customers by what they've actually spent.

Why it doesn't match Shopify or Stripe

It shouldn't, and that's not a bug. Your store total is all revenue. Attributed revenue is the revenue email can take credit for under the rules above.

The gap goes both ways. Attribution under-counts when someone reads on their phone and buys on a laptop without clicking, when a purchase lands just outside the window, or when a forwarded email reaches a buyer who isn't the recipient. It over-counts when a customer was going to buy anyway and an email merely happened to be nearby.

It's also worth knowing that every marketing tool you run claims the same order independently. Meta, Google, and Audienceful can each legitimately report the same $200 purchase inside their own attribution windows — so never add attributed revenue across platforms.

Use the number for comparison rather than as an absolute: campaign against campaign, flow against flow, this quarter against last. That's where it's genuinely reliable.

Requirements

Revenue attribution turns on automatically once Audienceful can see your orders — there's nothing to install, no tracking script, and no links to tag. You'll need:

• A connected Stripe or Shopify integration.
• Contacts in Audienceful that match your customers by email address.

If you've been selling for a while, a historical import backfills your past orders so customer spend data and segments are complete from day one.

Questions about your numbers? Email support@audienceful.com — we're happy to dig into specific orders with you.