Our marketing team’s attribution went haywire after iOS ATT. We tried Firebase+UTM links but saw 40% of subscriptions show as ‘direct’ traffic, making campaign optimization impossible. Recently switched to handling onboarding via web flow where UTM tags stay attached throughout. Curious - how are others handling cross-platform tracking without violating privacy guidelines? Has anyone else tried moving attribution logic completely off mobile?
Key is keeping users in web flow until conversion. We run landing page A/B tests with preserved UTMs, then pass final campaign ID to app via deep link. Web2Wave’s system auto-logs this as the source. Changed 80% of our ‘direct’ traffic to tracked last month.
Tracked campaign IDs in cookies during web onboarding. When user installs app from there, we attach those IDs to subscription events. Basic but works.
Web flows preserve tags. No SDK hacks.
Three steps that worked for us:
- Capture UTM params at first web touchpoint
- Store in browser storage through checkout
- Pass to mobile via encrypted link parameters
Sync with Mixpanel/Amplitude through server events. Zero reliance on device-level tracking.
Tried server-side tracking but got messy. Now using web-based onboarding with UTMs baked into every API call. Subscription events show original source. Saw CAC accuracy improve 37% in 3 weeks.
We just track web conversions separately. Mobile analytics stay broken.