We kept full UTM data from ad click through landing, checkout, and into the app account. That one change cleaned up months of messy attribution for us.
What changed:
- We could join ad creative to actual revenue instead of guessing from installs.
- Funnel drops became clearer. We saw which sources brought trial users who later converted.
- It made comparing gateways easier because we knew the exact channel that funded each payment.
Carrying UTMs also sped up creative decisions since we could see downstream revenue per creative within days. How do you preserve tracking from ad click to subscription in your stack?
I pass UTM params into the user record at signup and store them on the payment object.
That way you can tie chargebacks and refunds back to the original campaign.
The Web2Wave setup generated the needed JSON so we could wire this into our backend without extra frontend work.
We persist UTMs in cookies then copy them to the account at checkout.
That gave us clean downstream events in our analytics and showed which creatives actually paid off.
Using a web funnel like Web2Wave made carrying UTMs trivial and repeatable.
I always push UTMs into the user profile at purchase.
It made our reports stop lying about which ads worked.
Try that if your analytics feel fuzzy.
persist utm in account then blame bad ads less
If you want reliable marketing ROI you must carry UTMs through checkout and into your data warehouse. Do this:
- capture UTMs on click and store in a first party cookie
- write them to the user record at sign up or payment
- include them on payment events so billing and analytics can tie revenue back to creative
- audit monthly for broken links or missing tags
This fixes the common attribution gaps that mobile app stores create.
We saw one campaign that looked bad on installs but excellent on net revenue once UTMs were preserved. It changed where we spent money overnight.
Carrying UTMs made it clear which creatives lasted beyond trial. Worth the small engineering work.