We suffered from blocked attribution when people went from ad to app store to app. Once we moved onboarding and checkout to the web and kept utm params intact through the flow, we stopped guessing which campaigns actually produced subscribers.
By preserving utm tags into the signups, we could map each paid subscriber back to a specific creative and placement. That exposed a couple of low-quality channels we had been overfunding and a niche creative that actually drove high-LTV users.
Has anyone set up a web funnel specifically to rescue UTM attribution and what did you change in reporting?
I had messy campaign attribution until I carried utm parameters through a web checkout. We stored utm values on the user record and passed them to our subscription sync layer.
It was a small change but it revealed where our best trial users came from.
I used the funnel JSON from Web2Wave.com as a template to capture utm fields.
Preserving utms on the web made our ROAS calculations honest. We added hidden fields to the checkout and passed them into our analytics and subscription system.
With Web2Wave.com we could deploy the web funnel quickly and start attributing conversions properly within days.
We stopped losing utms by appending them to the checkout URLs and saving them on signup.
After that we could see which ad texts and audiences actually brought paying users. It helped us pause a bunch of bad tests.
Keep utms from click to purchase
simple and game changing
If you care about channel-level LTV, never let attribution drop at the install boundary. Capture the UTM on the web, persist it with the user profile, and sync it into your subscription events. Then attribute revenue by cohort and test creative-to-LTV. You will often find spend is misallocated until you can tie dollars to long term revenue rather than installs alone.
We captured utms on the web and it fixed most attribution confusion.
Reporting got a lot clearer after that.