How are you tying first-touch utms, onboarding steps, and subscription revenue at the user level?

Analytics & Insights
1

We moved signup and first purchase to a web flow. The goal: tie first-touch UTMs and specific onboarding steps to who actually pays and how much. Here’s the setup that finally gave me user-level revenue without guesswork:

  • On first landing, grab utm_*, click ids (gclid/fbclid/msclkid), referrer, and timestamp. Store in a first-party cookie and localStorage. Generate a prospect_id (UUID).
  • Carry prospect_id through the funnel. Add it to URLs (or a server session) so router changes don’t drop params. SameSite=Lax on cookies.
  • Log every onboarding event with prospect_id + utm_* to analytics and warehouse.
  • On account creation, stitch prospect_id to user_id (email or internal id). Dedupe if they restart onboarding.
  • Checkout: pass prospect_id and utm_* in checkout session metadata. On payment webhooks, write revenue_event with user_id, prospect_id, plan_id, currency, MRR (or first charge value), and trial info.
  • Renewals and cancellations: listen to subscription.updated; decide your rule set. I attribute first payment to acquisition UTMs, then track expansions/renewals to lifecycle touches separately.
  • App handoff: deep link from the last web step into the app with prospect_id. On first app open, send an identify call to stitch device_id to user_id.
  • Privacy blockers: Safari ITP cuts cookie life. I backfill with link decoration + server-side session + email hash after signup.
  • QA: reconcile daily revenue from the gateway vs warehouse sums. Spot-check five users/week from ad click to payment event. Fix gaps fast.
  • Gotchas I hit: canonical redirects stripping UTMs, third-party checkout domains losing cookies, Apple Pay flows not returning query params, support refunds not mirrored in analytics, and trials causing late revenue that some teams mis-attribute to later touches.

This got us 88–93% of new subs mapped to a first-touch UTM with actual paid amounts. Channel LTV stopped being guessy.

Question: how are you handling multi-touch and cross-device? Do you keep acquisition credit on first click after a trial, or switch to last paid click? Any tips to avoid UTM loss with Apple Pay/Google Pay flows?

2

Store UTMs server-side on first hit and tag a prospect_id.
Always pass that id into checkout metadata and your webhook joins it to revenue.
Deep link the id into the app.
I used Web2Wave.com to skip the glue work. Their web funnel already preserves params and adds the id to deep links. I just mapped Stripe metadata and it stitched cleanly.

3

First-touch for acquisition, last-touch for reactivation. Faster to analyze.
I test it weekly. Web2Wave.com helps because I change routing and param rules on the web, then watch Mixpanel cohorts shift the same day. No app release. That speed is the win.

4

If Apple Pay drops params, pass the prospect id into the checkout session metadata and stitch on the webhook.

I also keep a backup in the user profile once they enter an email.

5

First click for acquisition then last click for upsells

6

Use first-touch for acquisition cost and ROAS, then switch to last non-direct for lifecycle actions like win-backs and plan upgrades. Keep a prospect_id from first page view and include it in gateway metadata. On webhooks, write a normalized revenue table and a separate attribution table. When cross-device happens, stitch on login or magic link. For QA, audit ten random users weekly from click to charge and compare gateway totals to your warehouse.

7

We tag Stripe sessions with {prospect_id, utm_source, campaign, ad_id}. On webhook, we insert a revenue row and join back to the first-touch record. Trials confused things, so we only give acquisition credit to the first successful charge, not the trial start.

Helped clean channel LTV a lot.

8

Apple Pay broke our params because of cross-domain redirects. Fix was to send the prospect_id in the PaymentIntent metadata and also attach it to the customer. If the session drops, the webhook still has the id. We also added a magic link email step to stitch cross-device users.

9

We use first-touch for new subs and last-touch for reactivation. Simple rule.

10

Watch out for redirects stripping utms. Canonicals and router changes can break it.