Attribution

Attribution is the decision of which click earned a later outcome. An order arrives hours after the visit that produced it, so something has to connect the two, and on a short link that something is an identifier issued at the moment of the redirect: appended to the destination address and written to a first-party cookie on your own redirect domain, which is why it survives in browsers that discard anything third-party.

The second half of the rule is the window. An outcome that arrives after the window has closed is refused with a code that says exactly that, kept distinct from a broken or forged identifier — the difference between "too late" and "wrong token" should never need a support ticket to establish. The identifier itself is signed and bound to one workspace, so a token from another tenant's link is rejected rather than quietly credited.

The classic error is expecting a single number. Campaign tags describe where the visit came from, the identifier proves which click it was, and a long window credits touches that a short one does not.