What’s the best way to track stripe sales and subscriptions?

Stripe sales and subscription tracking can significantly improve your business's revenue insights and decision-making. Here's a quick guide to getting started:

• Use Stripe's Built-in Tools: Access key metrics like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), churn rates, and active subscribers directly from the Stripe dashboard. Features like Smart Retries recover failed payments automatically.
• Set Up Webhooks: Automate event tracking (e.g., successful payments, subscription updates) to stay informed in real-time.
• Leverage UTM Parameters: Track the source of your sales by adding UTM codes to your Stripe payment links and checkout processes.
• Integrate No-Code Tools: Use platforms like Zapier to sync Stripe data with Google Sheets or Airtable for streamlined reporting.
• Monitor Retention and LTV: Analyze churn, subscription plan performance, and lifetime value (LTV) to refine your strategy.

Quick Comparison of Key Tools and Features

Stripe Product Walkthrough subscriptions

Stripe's Built-in Tracking Features

Stripe's dashboard offers a range of tools to help businesses keep tabs on their sales and subscription performance. Here's a closer look at what it brings to the table.

Core Metrics in Stripe Dashboard

The dashboard provides insights into essential subscription metrics such as Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), active subscribers, trial conversions, churn rates, and collection efficiency. These metrics give businesses a clear picture of their subscription performance.

The "Explore" feature allows users to dive deeper into specific data, like churn trends or subscription expansions, offering more detailed insights into customer behavior [3].

One standout feature is Stripe's AI-powered Smart Retries, which helped recover 11% more revenue in 2023, reclaiming over $3.4 billion in failed payments [2].

Marketing Attribution Gaps

While Stripe excels in tracking subscription metrics, it has some limitations when it comes to marketing attribution:

"Accurate conversion tracking can be tricky, as in many cases the actual conversion (payment) happens outside of your website, in third-party systems like Stripe." - Team Tracklution [4]

Here are some of the challenges businesses face:

• Limited ability to integrate tracking codes into the payment process
• Difficulty tracking conversions from Stripe Payment Links
• Campaign data often gets lost during trial-to-paid transitions
• Cross-domain tracking issues create data gaps

These limitations can reduce the effectiveness of digital advertising efforts, as precise attribution data is critical for optimizing campaigns [4].

Setting Up Stripe Webhooks

Webhooks are a powerful way to monitor events and ensure accurate tracking of customer actions and payments. Here’s a quick overview of how to set them up:

• Create an endpoint to receive event data.
• Test locally using the Stripe CLI to ensure proper functionality.
• Register the endpoint with Stripe to start receiving events.
• Verify signatures to ensure data integrity.
• Set up event-specific monitoring for tailored tracking.

Stripe ensures reliability by attempting to deliver webhook events for up to three days in live mode [5]. Once implemented, webhooks can automate tasks like handling invoices, updating customer records, triggering notifications, and syncing with other tools [6].

For further customization, metrics definitions in the Billing overview can be configured to calculate MRR, churn, and active subscriber data based on your specific needs [3]. Additionally, Stripe's recovery tools boast an impressive 57% recovery rate for failed recurring payments [2].

Next, we’ll dive into how UTM parameters can take sales attribution to the next level.

UTM Parameter Setup for Sales Attribution

Building Your UTM Structure

To track the origins of Stripe sales effectively, you need to set up UTM parameters thoughtfully. Here's how to structure them:

Keep your UTM parameters concise - ideally under 150 characters - and stick to alphanumeric characters, dashes, or underscores to avoid errors [7].

UTM Tracking Through Stripe Checkout

Once your UTM parameters are structured, the next step is ensuring they carry through the checkout process seamlessly.

1. Set Redirect Behavior: Configure Stripe Checkout to use the redirect confirmation option [7].
2. Use Client Reference IDs: Leverage the client_reference_id for every checkout session to maintain consistent tracking [7].

"Modify your payment link with URL parameters and Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes to get insight into customer behaviors and your marketing strategy's effectiveness. These tools help identify the source of your traffic and the marketing campaigns leading to the most conversions." - Stripe Documentation [7]

Maintaining UTM Data Accuracy

Preserving the integrity of your UTM data is critical, especially when transitioning from client-side to server-side tracking. A few essential strategies include:

• First-Party Cookies: Use first-party cookies to ensure data accuracy and add checkout.stripe.com to the referral exclusions in Google Analytics 4 [8][10].
• URL Shorteners: For long UTM-tagged URLs, use URL shorteners to simplify links while keeping tracking intact [9].

No-Code Tools for Stripe Data Tracking

Tracking Stripe data can be tricky, but no-code tools like Zapier make it easier by simplifying data integration and improving access - no heavy coding required.

Connecting Stripe to Other Tools via Zapier

Zapier acts as a bridge between Stripe and other essential business tools, enabling automated data tracking. For example, you can connect Stripe to Google Sheets or Airtable to automatically log customer details, payments, and UTM data into a single, organized database [11].

"By leveraging Stripe's subscription feature, I'm able to get paid faster for many of my recurring revenue relationships. Additionally, the real-time visibility of top clients based on total payments is a great reminder of where I should be spending most of my time to better nurture, serve, and expand those top-tier relationships" [14].

Next, let’s dive into how to set up instant updates using event notifications.

Setting Up Event Notifications

You can stay on top of key events in Stripe by setting up notifications. Here’s how:

• Webhook Endpoints: In your Stripe dashboard, create webhook endpoints and select the events you want to track. For example:

  Event Type	Purpose
  checkout.session.completed	Track successful purchases
  customer.subscription.updated	Monitor subscription changes
  invoice.payment_failed	Get alerts for payment issues

• Notification Channels: Use Zapier to connect Stripe events to tools like Slack. For instance, you can set up Slack alerts for successful sales or payment failures, ensuring your team can respond quickly [12].

Creating Sales Performance Dashboards

Once your data flows and notifications are automated, building dashboards to track performance becomes much simpler. These dashboards can give you a real-time view of your Stripe data. Recent stats show that 43% of software businesses plan to launch subscription models within the next five years [14].

When designing your dashboard, consider including the following key metrics:

"As founders, we need to go custom for the things that really make us stand out, and ruthlessly prune and go for best-in-class external offerings for the rest, especially in this hypercompetitive and more capital-constrained macro environment" [14].

To keep your data reliable, make sure your dashboard syncs with Stripe at regular intervals [13]. This ensures you’re always looking at the most up-to-date information.

Advanced Analytics Without Code

Building on automated data flows from no-code tools, advanced analytics platforms make it possible to dive deep into Stripe data without writing a single line of code.

Sales Funnel Analysis

Understanding your customer journey - from the first interaction to recurring payments - is key to improving conversions. No-code dashboards make it easy to track every stage of your sales funnel. Here's how different tools can support your analysis:

"Stripe is a flexible, easy-to-partner-with platform. The ease of transitioning to Stripe's usage-based billing meant we could move quickly and keep focusing on building a great product for our customers."

• Barry McCardel, co-founder and CEO at Hex [15]

These insights provide a strong foundation for diving deeper into retention metrics.

Subscription Retention Analysis

Retention analysis goes beyond funnel metrics, helping you refine your revenue strategy. By tracking key metrics like these, you can fine-tune your approach:

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): Keep tabs on changes over time.
• Churn Rate: Analyze customer attrition by segment.
• Subscription Plan Conversions: Measure the effectiveness of your plans.
• Failed Payment Recovery: Monitor how often failed payments are recovered.

For instance, Hex adopted Stripe Billing's usage-based pricing features in 2024 to improve retention and streamline billing. Within just three months, a large portion of their customers had migrated to the new model [15].

Customer LTV Calculations

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is a critical metric for deciding where to focus your marketing dollars and acquisition efforts. No-code platforms simplify LTV calculations by seamlessly integrating Stripe data with business intelligence tools.

Here are some strategies that have been shown to improve LTV:

Conclusion: Next Steps for Better Stripe Tracking

Tracking Stripe data effectively requires a structured approach to ensure high-quality data and seamless integration. Start by standardizing your UTM tracking - use lowercase letters and underscores to maintain consistent attribution data [18].

Here’s a roadmap to guide your implementation:

These steps build on earlier strategies to refine your Stripe tracking process. Integrating these actions with your current tools will simplify reporting and improve data accuracy.

Focus on these priorities moving forward:

• Centralize your billing system to manage all revenue streams in one place [16].
• Enable real-time updates to ensure immediate reflection of any changes [16].
• Strengthen data security with advanced protection protocols [16].

FAQs