Subscription products tempt teams into importing a performance-marketing window and calling it product truth. A person who saw a video on a Tuesday and started a trial on the following Monday is not the same object as a person who opened the paywall from a settings screen after four months of free reading. Collapsing them into “attributed install, seven days” makes a channel look like a product.
In Funnel Leak Forensics we ask a simpler question first: what clock does the customer actually live on? If the trial is fourteen days, a seven-day click window will congratulate campaigns that never met a billing event. If billing grace is three days after a failed renew, a same-day cancel chart will panic on a problem the store has not finished.
Three clocks, written down
We keep three clocks in the dictionary: the campaign clock (if you must have one), the trial clock, and the billing clock. They are allowed to disagree. The readout’s job is to say which clock the decision uses. Mixing them in one chart is how a Patron Circle desk often begins — with a screenshot and a sigh.
An unknown source is a respectable row. A forced source is a political row.
When identity is incomplete, we would rather publish “unattributed, 31%” than invent last-touch from a push that everyone received. The Signal Atlas treats identify and alias as load-bearing precisely so this row can shrink over time without fiction. If your board cannot bear a large unknown, the work is identity, not a shorter window.
This studio still will not teach you how to buy media. We will teach you not to let media’s clocks colonise the product schema. That limitation is intentional and, for some readers, disqualifying. Better to know now.