Impact: attribution in your first week

Adopt Hogsend and you know what your lifecycle work is doing to revenue and your funnel from the first week — per journey, per campaign, per channel, under any attribution lens. This page is the wiring checklist and the honest reading guide for the three numbers.

The three numbers

Impact reporting keeps three numbers separate, always labeled, never blended:

• Attributed — fractional credit that sums to the real total. Eight models (first, last, linear, time-decay, position, blended…) are all computed and persisted at conversion time, so switching models is instant and historical. Claim strength: this touch path earned a share.
• Influenced — coverage: the full value of every conversion a journey touched at all. Deliberately multi-counts across journeys (it's reach, not credit) and never sums to the total. Claim strength: we were in the room.
• Incremental — holdout-backed lift: what would not have happened without the journey. The only number allowed to say "caused". Claim strength: causal.

Everything correlational is labeled correlational in the API and Studio. When an incumbent tool shows you one big "attributed revenue" number, it is usually per-object last-touch with no cross-object dedup — summed, it exceeds what you actually earned. Hogsend shows the overlap instead of hiding it.

The first-week checklist

Day 0 — wire two things (≈15 minutes)

1. Arrival capture (2 minutes): add @hogsend/js to your landing pages. Ad clicks, UTM landings, and vanity-link arrivals become campaign.arrived / link.arrived touches.
2. One revenue webhook (10 minutes): point a Stripe (or order/subscription) webhook at a webhook source so purchases land on the spine with value + currency.

That's the whole setup. The built-in revenue conversion point fires on any trusted valued event with zero configuration (quote-shaped CRM events are excluded; browser-minted values never count). Author your own defineConversion with id: "revenue" to replace it, or set HOGSEND_DEFAULT_REVENUE_CONVERSION=false.

Optionally, define what progress means for you:

// A funnel is an ordered ladder; stages move on plain events — no CRM needed.
export const selfServe = defineFunnel({
  id: "self-serve",
  stages: [
    { id: "signed_up", on: "user.signup" },
    { id: "activated", on: "activation.completed" },
    { id: "subscribed", on: "subscription.started" },
  ],
});

// A milestone is just a conversion point without money.
export const activation = defineConversion({
  id: "activation",
  trigger: { event: "activation.completed" },
});

Day 1 — touches and influenced

Emails click, links get followed, landings arrive. Studio's Impact tab shows touch volume per channel, and the Influenced column starts filling: which conversions each journey/campaign touched at all.

Day 3 — first credits

Contacts who converted with a touch path in the window earn ledger credits. The attribution matrix shows the same conversions under all eight models side by side — with the Unattributed bar keeping the delta explicit (direct/imported conversions are never silently dropped), and the overlap line showing what single-credit reporting would have double-counted.

Day 7 — per-journey revenue, and the first lift read

• "This journey attributed £X under time-decay" is a groupBy=journey query, drill-down per template.
• If you set a holdout on a journey (holdout: { percent: 10 } on its meta), the lift endpoint compares entered vs held-out cohorts. The win probability is suppressed under 10 combined conversions and flagged under 100 contacts per cohort — at low volume you get honest "not enough data yet", never noise wearing a percentage sign.

Already running Hogsend? Credit your whole history today

hogsend attribution backfill

Replays your entire event history through conversion evaluation and the credit ledger — both idempotent, so re-running never double-counts, and ad-platform dispatches are never re-fired for historical conversions. A window/definition change gets a clean recompute: hogsend attribution backfill --definition revenue --recompute.

Reading guide — what each surface claims

Attribution windows are configurable per channel (windows: { email: days(5), sms: days(1) } on defineConversion) and apply forward only — the ledger is written at conversion time; the backfill command is the deliberate recompute path.

Is it wired? Ask the engine

The Studio Setup checklist (and GET /v1/admin/readiness) includes four attribution rows — arrival capture seen, valued events flowing, conversions firing, credits accruing — each naming the exact missing wire when the answer is "not yet".