Track only a customer's first purchase or first payment

Able generates a synthetic event called FirstPurchase for exactly this purpose. It's a copy of the Purchase event that Able creates when a customer it has tracked makes their first non-zero payment, and it fires only once per unique customer — so it corresponds 1:1 to your new paying customers, excluding recurring subscription payments and repeat orders.

This is especially useful with integrations such as Stripe, which don't have a native flag to indicate whether a payment is a first-time conversion or a recurring charge by an existing customer.

An important condition

FirstPurchase is only generated for customers Able tracked before the payment — it won't be created for pre-existing subscriptions where Able didn't track the original sign-up. This means the event reflects genuinely new customers acquired since Able was installed, rather than your entire existing customer base.

Using it in reports

In Revenue Tracking and Attribution, open the Conversion event dropdown and select FirstPurchase instead of Purchase. The report will then count and attribute only first purchases to their marketing sources.

Sending it to ad platforms

FirstPurchase can also be sent to ad platforms and other integrations, allowing you to optimise campaigns toward new customer acquisition rather than total payment volume. Note that ad platforms typically expect a standard event name — when sending FirstPurchase to Meta CAPI or the Google Ads API, you'll usually want to map it to Purchase (or another standard name) so it registers correctly. See how to map (rename) events when sending them to ad platforms for the details.

First purchase vs. reactivation

If you also want to capture customers who cancelled and later returned, Able generates a related event called Activation. It works the same way, except that it resets after a CancelSubscription event — so it fires again when a lapsed customer reactivates, whereas FirstPurchase only ever fires once per customer.

See also our answer on direct / none conversion sources in Google Analytics 4, which uses FirstPurchase to reconcile new-customer counts with your payment system.