You run a sponsorship in your newsletter. Three paid subscribers sign up the same day. Stripe says you made $147. Google Analytics shows two conversions. Your email platform claims four clicks to the checkout page.
None of them are lying. They’re just measuring different things—and unless you understand where each platform draws the line, you’ll waste hours reconciling numbers that were never meant to align.
The attribution window problem
Most monetisation platforms use different lookback windows by default. Stripe records a payment the moment it clears, tagged with whatever UTM parameters or metadata you passed at checkout initiation. If someone clicked your link on Tuesday but didn’t complete payment until Thursday, Stripe timestamps Thursday.
Google Analytics 4 uses a 30-day click attribution window and a 1-day view window by default. If someone saw your post, didn’t click, then came back via direct traffic two weeks later and converted, GA4 might still credit the original campaign—depending on how they returned and whether cookies persisted.
Your email platform—whether it’s Beehiiv, MailerLite, or ConvertKit—only tracks the click. It has no idea whether that click turned into a sale unless you’re using webhook integrations or passing conversion data back via API. Most operators aren’t.
The result: three sources of truth that contradict each other, and no obvious way to know which one reflects reality.
Session breaks and cross-device gaps
Attribution breaks hardest when someone switches devices or browsers. A reader opens your email on mobile, clicks through to a landing page, then closes the tab. Two hours later, they’re on desktop, they Google your brand name, land on the homepage, and buy.
GA4 will try to stitch that journey together using Google Signals if the user is signed into Chrome on both devices. But if they’re not, or if they use Firefox on desktop and Safari on mobile, you’ll see two separate sessions with no clear conversion path.
Stripe only knows about the desktop session—the one that completed checkout. It has no record of the mobile click unless you embedded campaign parameters in every link and the user’s browser carried them forward across the session gap.
Email platforms see the mobile click and nothing after. To them, it looks like the reader bounced.
Where the discrepancies actually matter
If you’re running paid ads or testing sponsorship placements, misattributed conversions will quietly drain your budget. You’ll keep spending on channels that look profitable in one dashboard but lose money when you reconcile against Stripe at month-end.
The fix isn’t to pick one platform and ignore the others. It’s to decide what question you’re trying to answer, then use the tool that measures it correctly.
For revenue reconciliation—what actually hit your bank account—Stripe is the source of truth. Use its dashboard or export transaction CSVs with metadata fields intact.
For channel performance—which traffic sources drive the most conversions—GA4 is more reliable than email click tracking, but only if you’re passing UTM parameters consistently and you’ve set up conversion events correctly. Check your attribution model settings under Admin > Data Display. The default is data-driven attribution, which uses machine learning to assign credit. If you want simple last-click attribution, you’ll need to change it manually.
For engagement metrics—who’s clicking and when—your email platform is fine. Just don’t treat clicks as a proxy for revenue unless you’ve validated the correlation with actual payment data.
The reconciliation workflow that works
Once a month, export three reports: Stripe transactions with UTM parameters or custom metadata, GA4 conversions by source/medium, and email click data by campaign. Don’t try to make the numbers match line by line. Instead, look for directional alignment.
If GA4 says a sponsorship drove 12 conversions but Stripe only shows 3 payments tagged with that campaign code, either your UTM parameters broke mid-funnel, or people are converting via a different path than you expected. Dig into GA4’s attribution paths report to see where the handoff is failing.
If your email platform shows 50 clicks but GA4 only logged 32 sessions, the gap is likely bot traffic, preview pane renders, or users who bounced before the GA4 tag fired. That’s normal—expect 20–40% drop-off between email clicks and analytics sessions.
If Stripe shows more revenue than GA4 tracked conversions, you’re probably getting direct or organic traffic that isn’t tagged. That’s fine. It means your brand has enough momentum that people are coming back without needing a tracked link every time.
The goal isn’t perfect attribution. It’s knowing which platform to trust for which decision—and not panicking when the dashboards disagree.
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