Marketing attribution software that starts from real payments

A useful attribution tool has to do three things well:

1. Record where each visitor came from, every time they arrive.
2. Know about each real payment, including refunds and renewals.
3. Link the payment to the visitor, then apply a rule for sharing credit.

Most web analytics tools do the first step well. Payment dashboards do the second. The hard part is the join between them, which usually means tag managers, ecommerce event schemas and spreadsheets.

Where revenue comes from

Revenue is counted only from signed payment webhooks and the authenticated Payment API. Amounts reported from the browser are never counted, because they can be forged. One-time payments, renewals and refunds are all recorded, and retried webhooks are stored once.

How a payment is matched to a visitor

1. The visitor identifier passed through checkout, such as Stripe’s client_reference_id.
2. An email address the site linked to the visitor earlier with statsy.identify().
3. A known customer record, matched by email or customer id.

A payment that cannot be matched still counts toward total revenue, but it is not credited to a channel. Direct visits earn credit only when the buyer had no other source in the lookback window, so a customer who returns by typing your address does not erase the campaign that found them.

A simple way to use them: last touch shows what closes sales, first touch shows what finds new buyers, and linear or position based show the full journey. Visitor journeys in Statsy show each customer’s touches and payments in order, so you can check the model against real paths.

• Creators and indie builders who want to know which posts and newsletters turn into sales.
• SaaS teams who need renewals and refunds counted, not only the first payment.
• Teams with European audiences. Auto mode counts EU, EEA, UK and Swiss visitors without cookies, and keeps visitor-level attribution for everyone else.
• People who prefer to ask questions in an AI assistant. The MCP server exposes the attribution report to Claude, Cursor and VS Code.

Sources for GA4, checked September 2026: attribution models, which notes that first click, linear, time decay and position-based models are no longer available as of November 2023; lookback windows; ecommerce measurement; and Google Analytics overview.

Choose GA4 for Google Ads bidding, audiences and app plus web analytics at scale. Choose Statsy when you want revenue by channel from your payment provider with little setup. Statsy has no ad platform integrations and does not report ad spend or return on ad spend.

Each tool is a reasonable choice for the job it was designed for. If you want open source or self-hosting, look at Plausible or Umami. Check each vendor’s own site before deciding; plans and features change often.

• Cookieless visitors cannot be linked across days by design, so multi-day journeys are only visible for Full mode visitors.
• Offline sales and payment systems without a webhook need the Payment API, sent from your server.
• Credit models are rules, not proof of cause. Compare models and look at real journeys before moving budget.

1. Add the Statsy script (about 3 KB gzipped) to every page of your site.
2. In Statsy, choose your payment provider, copy the webhook URL into the provider and paste its signing secret back.
3. Tag links with UTM parameters, for example utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=launch. Referrers are recognised without tags.
4. For checkouts created on your server, pass statsy.visitorId() as statsy_vid in the checkout metadata.

Want replays and heatmaps of the buyers too? See how Statsy works as a Hotjar alternative.