I moved our onboarding and paywall to a simple web funnel and kept the utm params through every step. What I noticed first was that attribution stopped being a guessing game. We could see which creative led to a paid subscription in Mixpanel instead of losing visibility at the trial boundary.
A few practical wins I saw:
- preserved utms let us tie downstream revenue to the exact ad creative.
- no native code changes were needed to capture the events we cared about.
- as we scaled we hit privacy thresholds less often because we had deterministic web signals.
It is not perfect for every category, but for subscription apps this cut ambiguity in half for us. How have others handled cases where web funnels changed the traffic mix and ROAS comparisons to direct app ads?
I did this on a couple indie apps. We preserved utms in the web checkout and pushed events into Mixpanel.
Saved a ton of time because we did not touch native code. For one app I used the Web2Wave AI to spit out a JSON funnel and their SDK just read it. It was that simple.
If you want speed focus on reliable utm carry and a small analytics spec first.
We treat the web funnel as our experiment layer. I capture utms on entry and never drop them. Then I watch downstream events in our analytics tool and cut losing creatives fast.
Using a platform that lets me edit funnels and have changes appear in the app instantly is my secret. I prototype copy and prices on the web and ship the winners without waiting for store reviews.
I kept the utm on the URL through the whole checkout and it made a big difference.
We could tell which creatives actually produced paying users and which just drove installs. It made optimization decisions a lot clearer.
Have you compared channel ROAS after switching to web?
Preserve the utm
Track in Mixpanel
Profit
Preserving utms in a web onboarding funnel gives you deterministic attribution that is otherwise very noisy on mobile. I recommend a simple flow: capture utm on landing, persist it to the user record at sign up, and surface it in your analytics so trial to paid conversions are queryable by campaign and creative. Mixpanel or similar lets you follow users beyond the trial and measure LTV by channel. Expect differences in cohort quality when you move traffic to web. Run a parallel test and normalize for creative and landing experience before you reallocate budgets.
We started with a landing page that appended utms to sign up links. Then we wrote the utm to a user property on account creation and used that for cohort reports.
This made creative level decisions obvious and cut wasted spend on weak creatives.
Preserving utms reduced our attribution noise and helped us find creatives that actually paid.