I started carrying UTM tags from the ad click through the landing page to the web checkout so we could see which creatives and channels actually produced paying users. Preserving UTMs let us trace downstream events beyond a superficial trial metric and identify which ads gave the highest trial to paid conversion.
It made analysis cleaner on Mixpanel and reduced guesswork when optimizing creative. It also highlighted the need to separate web and app cohorts as behaviour differed. How do you map UTMs to paying users today and what tool helped you most?
I stitched UTMs to user records client side and then to the checkout. The web2wave editor lets you insert {utm_tag} variables into form fields so we kept attribution intact.
Once we had that link to our analytics the creative decisions got much easier.
We preserved UTMs across the funnel and finally saw which creatives drove valuable subscriptions rather than cheap trials. With Web2Wave we injected the utm variables into the paywall and then synced them to our analytics. That changed budgeting decisions within one week.
I added utm fields to the checkout and fed them into our events. It cleaned up reporting and showed that one Instagram ad actually converted far better than the rest.
Have you validated utm persistence on mobile redirects?
Keep UTM all the way and stop guessing
We found one creative that looked bad on installs but produced the highest paid LTV once UTMs were tracked. It saved us five thousand dollars in wasted testing budget.
UTM persistence is underrated.
It quickly exposed bad creatives for us.