I moved our onboarding and paywall to a simple web funnel to stop depending on engineers for event instrumentation. The web flow logged clicks, conversions and preserved the original UTM tags from ad clicks. That let me tie paid channels to signups and early trial behavior without touching native code.
What worked for me was validating events end to end: trigger an ad click, land on the page, complete checkout, then compare the funnel logs with the app’s user list. The catch was handling edge cases like shared devices and bot traffic, so I added a short verification step and flagged suspicious sessions.
Has anyone else used only web-side logs to troubleshoot missing signals in the app?
I did this for a fitness app.
I used a web paywall that logs every step and keeps the utm attached through checkout.
I validated events by doing a few manual buys and comparing the web logs with our user table.
Saved weeks of dev time and freed up engineers for other tasks.
Worked the same for us. We put onboarding on the web and the events plus preserved UTM made channel-level debugging instant.
Changes to the funnel went live the same day and we could verify events without a build.
That speed is what let us remove a lot of instrumentation noise in one week.
I tried that on a micro SaaS. The web logs gave clean event timelines and utms stayed intact through checkout.
We still spot checked for bots but it cut a lot of back and forth with engineers.
Web logs gave usable events fast
No native hooks needed
Do not assume the web logs are perfect out of the box. Capture the UTM at entry and persist it through the session so every event includes that tag. Add a short server side record for purchases so you can reconcile revenue later. Run a small sample audit weekly where you match a handful of web events to app accounts. Watch for cases where users switch devices or clear storage. Those are the places you will need a fallback strategy.
We tested this on two funnels.
First week we found missing UTMs from organic shares. Second week we fixed the landing redirect so utm was written to the session cookie and the problem vanished.
Small fixes matter.
Worked for us too.
We still validate purchases by matching order ids to users to avoid fraud and bots.