How forwarding works

Forwarding is a ledger, not a fire-and-forget. Every conversion produces one visible row per platform it routes to — shown on the conversion in your Events page — and that row tells you what happened: sent, pending, skipped, or failed. Any row that isn't sent shows its reason right on it. When something doesn't forward, you read why instead of wondering.

Timing windows

The platforms don't accept conversions forever, so we don't send what they'd discard:

• Meta drops web events older than 7 days. A conversion that surfaces later than that is skipped, with the age in the reason.
• Google rejects conversions for clicks older than 90 days. We apply the same 90-day rule to LinkedIn.

In practice these windows are generous for SaaS — a trial that converts in week two is comfortably inside both. They matter for long sales cycles: a deal that closes five months after the ad click is still attributed in your dashboard, but the platform won't take the conversion back.

Retries and duplicates

The forwarding queue drains every minute, so a typical conversion reaches the platform within a minute or two of the payment. Sends that fail for transient reasons retry automatically with backoff. Every event carries a stable event ID, so a retry can never double-count a conversion on the platform side. A conversion held up for a missing piece — a CRM deal that closed before the amount was entered — waits for the data and forwards when it lands, window permitting.

Refunds correct Google

When a payment is fully refunded or a chargeback is lost, Google supports retracting the original conversion — so we do. Your Google campaigns report revenue that matches what you actually kept. Meta and LinkedIn don't offer a correction mechanism, so refunds there are reflected in your Attributely dashboard only. The retraction has its own toggle under Integrations, on the Stripe connection, if you'd rather Google's numbers stay gross.

EU, UK, and Swiss visitors

We treat privacy-strict regions conservatively, and we'd rather under-report than mishandle data:

• Google receives the click ID only, with consent explicitly marked as denied — Google's Consent Mode is built to handle exactly this signal, and models the rest.
• Meta and LinkedIn have no equivalent consent channel, so for these visitors the send is suppressed entirely.
• A conversion whose country we can't determine is treated as strict.

The consequence, stated plainly: conversions from EEA, UK, and Swiss customers are under-counted on Meta and LinkedIn. That's a trade we make on purpose — sending personal data without a consent path isn't one.

When nothing forwards

A conversion with no ad click anywhere in the customer's history — they came from a podcast, a referral, organic search — is recorded, attributed in your dashboard, and skipped for forwarding with the visible reason no forwardable click id. For a SaaS business this is a meaningful share of conversions, and it's the honest share: no platform earned them.