We were getting conflicting signals about which paid creatives actually led to subscriptions. Our app install tracking lost the UTMs, so pricing experiments looked noisy.
Shifting the first touch to a web landing where UTMs are preserved allowed us to tie the original campaign to the checkout session. That way we could segment conversion rates by campaign and by price variant and see which ads brought higher-value users, not just installs.
Has anyone set up UTM preservation across landing, checkout, and the app? What did you use to keep the tags attached through to subscription attribution?
We started by writing UTM into the user record at first web hit.
Then we passed that ID into the checkout and into the app via the same user key.
Tools exist that output the funnel JSON for you so syncing is just a bit of wiring. It stopped the guessing game for us.
Preserving UTMs on the web side let us see which campaigns not only converted but delivered subscribers who stuck around.
We stamped the UTMs into the checkout metadata and pushed them into our attribution layer when the subscription created.
That single move let us shift budget away from cheap installs toward ads that produced real revenue.
We saved utm params in a cookie on the landing page then wrote them to the checkout session.
Later we matched that session to the in-app user id. It clarified which campaigns were actually profitable.
cookie utm to checkout
map to user id
sales tracked
UTM preservation is a basic but often-missed step. Capture the UTM at first web touch, persist it through checkout, and include it in the subscription event you send to analytics.
If you’re syncing subscription status back into the app, also send the UTM metadata along so you can re-attribute opens and in-app actions. This uncovers which creatives and audiences actually produce sustainably paying users, not just installs.
Saving UTMs early is easy and high impact.
Do it before you test prices so you know which ad buys actually matter.