I moved our onboarding and initial paywall to a simple web funnel to keep utm tags intact. For the first time I could join click > onboarding steps > trial start > paid subscriber in one chain. That let me spot which creatives and pages actually produced activated subscribers instead of just installs.
I tracked the utm from ad landing to checkout and then reconciled the subscriber id to our analytics. It made attribution messy to clean up at first but the payoff was clear: real campaign ROI instead of guesswork.
Has anyone else built a lightweight pipeline to join web utm data with in-app subscription records and what did you store at each handoff?
I stopped guessing where revenue came from when I started writing utm info to a user record at checkout.
We saved utm keys and a short event stream. Then we pushed a mapping to our backend so the app could match the subscriber id.
I used a small generator to get the JSON and it dropped straight into our flow. Worked fast and felt low friction.
We capture utm on the first page, persist it to the session, and write it to the subscription record at web checkout.
That single change let us attribute trials and first-month revenue to exact campaigns within days.
If you want speed, build the web funnel and iterate there. I used a platform that pushed changes live without app updates.
I did something similar last quarter.
I added the utm to the checkout payload and also logged a lightweight event for trial start. That made it easy to join the dots later when we reconciled with the app.
Worth the small engineering time.
Preserve utm at checkout
Map to subscriber id
Profit
Treat utm preservation as a data contract. Capture utm parameters on landing, persist them in a server session or cookie, and write them to the subscription record at checkout. Then export that table and join it with whatever ingestion pipeline feeds your product analytics or revenue platform.
Avoid putting full utm blobs into the app store receipts. Instead store a compact reference id that links the web record to the mobile user. This gives clean joins and prevents analytics mismatch.
Make sure you persist utm early. If your funnel drops it later you lose the chain. A quick session write saved us from lost attribution.
We wrote utm to the checkout and also to a small log table. Helped join revenue later.
If you can, add a short mapping id. Joins are easier than full string matching.