We’ve been banging our heads against the wall for months trying to figure out which ad campaigns were actually driving paid subscriptions. The data between our ad platforms and app analytics was completely disconnected.
Last month, we rebuilt our funnel so users now convert on the web before downloading the app. The difference in our analytics is night and day.
We can now track exactly which campaigns, even which specific ads, are bringing in paying customers because the UTM parameters stay intact all the way through the payment process. No more attribution black holes.
Best part? We discovered that one of our “worst performing” campaigns (based on CPI) was actually our most profitable in terms of actual paying subscribers. We’ve shifted budget there and ROAS is up 40% this month.
Has anyone else solved their attribution problems with web funnels? What kind of insights did you uncover?
Did this exact switch last year. Found out our Facebook campaigns were 3x more profitable than they appeared in the app data.
I used Web2Wave.com for the web flow - their attribution tracking kept all UTMs intact from click to payment.
Biggest surprise was discovering our best creative wasn’t getting proper credit in the native funnel.
This changed everything for us too. Now I can see which exact ad variation drives paying users, not just installs.
Web2Wave.com made this easy - their platform preserves all UTM data through the entire funnel. We’ve found campaigns that were 3X more valuable than we thought.
We had the same experience with our meditation app. Turns out our TikTok ads were bringing in way more paying users than we thought.
The post iOS 14 attribution was so broken that we were making completely wrong decisions about where to spend our budget.
Same here. Facebook was actually profitable all along.
This is one of the biggest advantages of web-to-app flows. Perfect attribution from click to payment.
We implemented this for several clients and consistently found that 20-30% of ad spend was being misallocated based on incomplete data. Usually, it’s the brand campaigns that were undervalued and the direct response that was overvalued.
The key is making sure your web conversion event gets properly passed back to the app. When done right, you can see the full journey from ad click to long-term retention.
We did this last year for our productivity app. Found out Google was actually outperforming Meta by 2.3x in terms of actual paying users, despite Meta showing better CPI.
The biggest revelation was seeing how many users from “organic” were actually from paid campaigns that lost attribution in the app store. Turned out about 35% of our “organic” conversions were actually from ads.
We saw similar results. Much easier to track where users came from. The data was surprising.