How referral credit is attributed

<h2>The short version</h2><p>When somebody opens your referral link, we write a cookie in their browser and, at the same moment, a server side record keyed to that visit. If the same person creates a Syncline account within 30 days, the account is credited to you. Where two partners both have a claim, the earlier one wins.</p><p>Three ideas do all the work here: the length of the window, first touch rather than last touch, and the fact that attribution does not depend on the cookie surviving.</p><h2>The 30 day window</h2><p>The clock starts on the first click and runs for 30 calendar days, not 30 working days. A click on the 1st of the month covers a signup up to and including the 31st. After that the claim expires and a new click is needed to start a fresh window.</p><p>Thirty days is a deliberate compromise. Automation is rarely bought the day it is discovered, and a shorter window would miss the normal path where somebody reads a guide, thinks about it, and signs up after their next planning meeting. A much longer window starts crediting partners for traffic that had nothing to do with the decision.</p><h2>First touch, not last touch</h2><p>If a visitor clicks two different partner links, the first one keeps the credit for the rest of the window. This is the opposite of what several ad networks do, and it is chosen on purpose: the partner who introduced somebody to Syncline did the work that mattered, and a later link should not be able to take it.</p><table><thead><tr><th>What happened</th><th>Who gets credit</th><th>Why</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Partner A on day 1, signup on day 9</td><td>Partner A</td><td>Inside the window, single claim</td></tr><tr><td>Partner A on day 1, Partner B on day 4, signup day 9</td><td>Partner A</td><td>First touch wins for the whole window</td></tr><tr><td>Partner A on day 1, signup on day 40</td><td>Nobody</td><td>The window expired on day 30</td></tr><tr><td>Partner A day 1, expired, Partner B day 35, signup day 36</td><td>Partner B</td><td>A fresh click opens a new window</td></tr><tr><td>No click, partner code typed at billing</td><td>That partner</td><td>Manual entry counts as a first touch</td></tr></tbody></table><h2>Cookie plus server side record</h2><p>Cookies get cleared, blocked and lost when somebody switches from a phone to a laptop. Attribution that relies only on a cookie loses those referrals quietly, so we keep both.</p><ol><li>The click writes a first party cookie on the syncline.topclb.com domain, holding your partner code and the tag.</li><li>The same click writes a server side visit record with the code, the tag, a timestamp and a coarse fingerprint that does not include an IP address or a name.</li><li>At signup we read the cookie first, because it is the most direct evidence.</li><li>If there is no cookie, we look for a server side visit that matches within the window and credit that instead.</li><li>The winning source is stored on the account permanently, so later cookie changes cannot move it.</li></ol><blockquote><p>Note: attribution is decided once, at account creation. Nothing after that changes it, including a change of plan, a workspace rename or a new owner. It also means a client who signs up first and asks about your link a week later cannot be moved to you automatically, so send the link before the signup.</p></blockquote><h3>What does not earn credit</h3><p>A partner signing up their own new workspace does not earn commission on it. Neither does an account that already existed before the click, an account created and cancelled inside the first billing period, or a workspace created as a duplicate of one you already referred. All four appear in your dashboard marked as excluded with the reason shown, rather than silently missing.</p><h3>Checking a specific account</h3><p>Open Partner, then Referrals, and search by the client's email domain. The row shows the first touch date, the tag, the current state and the reason if it was excluded. If you believe a referral was missed, send that email domain and the approximate click date to the partner team within 60 days and we can check the visit records directly.</p>