Glossary
The vocabulary of revenue recovery.
Short, plain-English definitions of the terms that come up when you’re reading Stripe logs, Meta dashboards, or our blog. Each entry answers the question in the first sentence.
Attribution
Attribution window
An attribution window is the time after an ad interaction during which a conversion will be credited to that ad. Common windows are 1-day view, 7-day click, and 28-day click. Shorter windows undercount; longer windows overcount.
Payments
Decline codes
Decline codes are the standardized reason codes a card network returns when a payment fails. They tell you whether to retry (insufficient funds), wait (do-not-honor), or stop (lost card).
Subscription
Dunning
Dunning is the process of recovering failed payments through automated retries and customer communications. Done well, it recovers 65-80% of failed charges; done badly, it recovers 20-30% and churns the rest.
Subscription
Involuntary churn
Involuntary churn is when a customer leaves a subscription not because they wanted to cancel, but because their payment failed and was never recovered. It typically accounts for 20-40% of all churn for subscription businesses.
Ad optimization
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
ROAS is revenue divided by ad spend, expressed as a ratio. A 3x ROAS means every $1 spent on ads returned $3 in revenue. Reported ROAS in ad platforms is usually 30-60% higher than true ROAS because of attribution gaps.