Channel Attribution: One Honest Scoreboard for Every Channel

Email ROI lives in your ESP, SMS in your texting tool, social in a scheduler, ads in two ad managers that disagree, organic in GA4, revenue in Stripe. Six tools, six definitions of "conversion", none comparable. Datalenk measures every channel with one system, one rule, and one currency: revenue.

One model, applied to everyone, no model shopping

Datalenk credits the channel of the entry session: the one that first brought the visitor. First-touch, and that is the only model there is. That is a deliberate choice, not a missing feature.

Model selectors sound generous and mostly enable self-deception: you switch to last-touch and email suddenly wins, you switch to position-based and paid suddenly wins, and you end up picking the model that flatters the channel you already wanted to fund. One rule, applied identically to every channel, gives you a number you can act on instead of six numbers you can argue with.

And it does not expire. The channel is welded to the customer in a durable ledger in Postgres, not in a session cookie. Every renewal, upgrade and expansion for the next three years still credits the channel that brought that customer in the first place. Lifetime value by acquisition source, for real, not lifetime value for as long as a cookie survives.

What it does

• Every channel, same rule: organic, email, SMS, social, referral, direct and AI assistants, measured by one referee applying one model, consistently.
• One currency, revenue: clicks, opens, likes and impressions become a means to an end, and the end is money, so channels are finally comparable.
• No self-attribution bias: ad platforms each claim the same conversion. Datalenk gives you the neutral count instead, so you stop scaling campaigns that quietly lose money.
• Renewals and LTV, credited to the source: the channel report you read in year two is still the truth about who brought those customers in year one.
• An honest "Unattributed" bucket: when we cannot place a payment, we show it as unattributed. We never delete a sale, and we never invent a channel for it. A dashboard that always adds up to 100% is a dashboard that is lying to you somewhere.

How it works

1. Add the script. Channels are classified automatically from the referrer and the UTMs you already use. Nothing to configure per channel.
2. Connect your payments (a read-only Stripe key, or any of a dozen native providers, or the payments API) so every channel ends in revenue, not a proxy metric.
3. Open the Channels report: every channel side by side, ranked by money, with lifetime value next to first-order revenue.

The honest part about multi-day journeys

By default Datalenk is cookieless: nothing is written on the visitor's device, and visits are stitched server-side within the day. So a visitor who arrives from social on Monday and converts from an email on Thursday is, by default, two separate visitors, and Monday's touch is not there to be credited.

If multi-day journeys matter to you, and for most SaaS they do, you have two honest options:

• switch on the Persistent layer (opt-in, consent-gated, writes a pseudonymous identifier), or
• call datalenk.identify(email) at signup or login. One line, and the person is welded to their entry channel for life and across devices.

We would rather tell you this on the feature page than let you discover it in your data three weeks in. See ↗.

Honest scope

Live today: automatic channel classification, first-touch attribution with the durable ledger, revenue and LTV per channel, AI assistants as their own channel, the unattributed bucket.

Not built, and we will not pretend otherwise: we do not pull cost from Google Ads or Meta Ads, and there is no native Klaviyo connector. So paid traffic is measurable only through the UTMs you put on your own links: you get the visits and the revenue those campaigns produced, and you never get a ROAS, because we do not know what you spent. Anyone showing you a ROAS built on a number they did not ingest is showing you a guess.

Datalenk does not create links. The short links you drop in DMs and newsletters come from Lenkli, a separate product in the same family; Datalenk reads them and turns dark-social clicks into attributed revenue. See ↗.

Why this matters

Siloed measurement does not just hide the truth, it actively misleads: the loudest channel wins the budget, not the most profitable one, and teams routinely cut their best channel because it reported modestly inside its own silo. Putting every channel in one currency makes the budget decision a sort, not a debate. And it usually reveals that the cheap channels, organic and email, were underfunded all along.

Go deeper

The full pillar: ↗. By channel: ↗, ↗, ↗, ↗.

Put every channel on one scoreboard. Same rule, one currency, tied to revenue. 14-day trial, card required, cancel in two clicks. Start your trial.

FAQ

What is multi-channel attribution? Measuring every marketing channel with one system, one model and one currency (revenue), so channels are directly comparable instead of each reporting in its own silo and its own units.

Which attribution model does Datalenk use? First-touch: the channel of the entry session gets the credit, and keeps it for that customer's renewals and lifetime value. There is no model selector, on purpose. One rule applied to every channel beats six inconsistent ones, and consistency across channels matters more than precision inside one.

Can I see the ROAS of my Google or Meta campaigns? No. We do not ingest ad spend, so we will not print a return on a cost we never saw. Tag your campaigns with UTMs and you will see exactly what they brought in visits and in revenue; you keep the cost side in the ad manager.

Does Datalenk send my emails or run my ads? No. It measures what they earn. Keep your sending and ad tools; Datalenk gives you the neutral, revenue-based scoreboard on top.