Guides · Acquisition

Which marketing channel brings paying customers, not just visits

Visits per channel are easy to count and easy to misread. How to follow each channel to sign-ups, activation and revenue, and the traps attribution sets for a small SaaS.

2026-10-14 · 3 min read

A launch day can bring thousands of visits and a handful of customers. A single thread in the right community can bring a few hundred visits and more customers than the launch. If you judge channels by visits, you'll put your time in the wrong place.

The fix is simple to say: follow each channel all the way to the money. This guide is how, and the traps that make the numbers lie when you only have a few hundred sign-ups.

Count four numbers per channel, not one

For each channel, over the same period:

An example, not real data. By visits, the launch wins by far. By paying customers it's last. The community thread turns 1 visitor in 84 into a customer; the launch, 1 in 1,550.

Visitors tell you about reach. Sign-ups, about your landing page. Activated, about whether the channel brings people who need what you make. Paying is the one you're trying to grow.

Credit each sign-up to the right visit

To follow a channel to a customer, each sign-up has to be linked to the visit that brought it. Three things get in the way:

• Referrers go missing. Many apps, mail clients and privacy settings strip them, and those visits land in "direct". A big "direct" usually means "we don't know", not "they typed your URL".
• People come back later. Someone reads a thread on Monday and signs up from a bookmark on Friday. Whether Friday's visit or Monday's gets the credit (last touch or first touch) changes the answer.
• Your own links aren't tagged. Add ?ref=newsletter or utm_source=newsletter to every link you control: newsletters, profiles, docs, posts. It's the cheapest attribution there is.

Pick one rule and keep it. Comparing channels under the same rule matters more than which rule you pick.

Give it time, and enough people

Paying comes days or weeks after the visit, after a trial. Compare channels by the people who signed up in a period, followed until today, not by what happened inside one week.

And mind small numbers. With 8 sign-ups from a channel, one customer more or less is a 12-point swing. Under about 30 sign-ups per channel, don't draw a conclusion from percentages: open the list and read who those people are and what they did.

Read what the numbers say

• Many visits, few sign-ups: the audience doesn't match, or the landing page doesn't speak to them. Look at which page they landed on.
• Many sign-ups, few activated: the channel brings curious people, not people with the problem. Or your onboarding loses them: see where users drop off.
• Few visits, high conversion to paying: this is where to spend more time.

Doing it with UserJourney

The snippet records where each visit came from (the referrer, utm_source or ref), and the first uj.identify() credits the sign-up to the visit that brought it. Payments come from your Paddle or Stripe account, matched by email or by the id you pass at checkout.

Traffic shows each source with its visitors, sign-up clicks, sign-ups, paying customers and MRR, and opens each source to the people it brought. It also shows the pages people land on, how long they read, and where they click to sign up. A sentence on top tells you which source does best.

One honest limit: visitors are counted without cookies, so a sign-up is credited to a visit from that day or the day before. A visit a week earlier from another device counts as direct.

Start for free or read the quickstart.

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