Discover how to track UTM parameters and other attribution data, enabling you to generate reports in Heap Analytics that reveal the sources behind your signups, customer acquisitions, and revenue growth.
Heap stands out as a powerful event-based analytics platform that helps you easily generate reports illustrating user behavior within your product.
That said, it doesn’t automatically collect UTM parameters by default, which makes it challenging to categorize your users and evaluate the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns in terms of signups, conversions, and revenue.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through four straightforward steps to start capturing UTM parameters and other attribution data in Heap, allowing you to gain insights into how users from different sources and campaigns engage with your product.
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What is Attributer?
Attributer is a lightweight script you can embed on your website. Once installed, it tracks your visitors and determines how they landed on your site. After identifying the source, it categorizes each visitor into predefined channels such as Organic Social, Organic Search, Paid Search, and more, then stores this structured attribution data in a browser cookie. Later, when a user completes a form on your site, Attributer automatically passes the UTM parameters and other attribution insights into Heap Analytics for reporting purposes. With this data available in Heap, you can create reports that answer questions like:
- How many signups did our LinkedIn campaigns generate?
- What’s the signup-to-customer conversion rate from Google Ads?
- How many customers came from our Facebook ads?
- How does retention compare between users from Google Ads versus Facebook Ads?
- And many other attribution-related insights.
How to Analyze UTM Parameters in Heap Analytics in 4 Simple Steps
Bringing UTM parameters into Heap Analytics with the help of Attributer is straightforward. Just follow these four simple steps to get started:
1. Attach UTM Parameters to All Your Campaigns
One of the most important steps is ensuring that every advertisement and marketing campaign you run includes UTM parameters. This allows Attributer to accurately identify the source of your website traffic.
You should apply UTM tags to search engine ads (such as Google and Bing), social media promotions (including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter), as well as any custom campaigns like those featured in industry magazines, email newsletters, and more.
2. Install the Attributer Script on Your Website
The next step is to embed the Attributer script into your website.
After signing up for a free trial, you’ll receive a snippet of code that should be inserted into your site—similar to how you would install Google Analytics or other marketing tool scripts.
Depending on the content management system (CMS) you’re using, such as WordPress or Wix, there’s usually a section in the Settings menu where you can paste this code.
Alternatively, if you use a tag manager like Google Tag Manager, you can deploy the code directly through that platform.
For detailed instructions, feel free to refer to our support documentation.
- Channel
- Channel Drilldown 1
- Channel Drilldown 2
- Channel Drilldown 3
- Landing Page
- Landing Page Group
3. Push Attribution Data into Heap Analytics
Once the Attributer script is active on your site, it begins tracking visitor sources and saving that data in cookies within their browsers.
The next step is to feed this attribution data into Heap Analytics, and you can do this using one of two methods:
- Use hidden fields in your forms – Add hidden fields to your signup forms, and Attributer will populate them with UTM parameters and other attribution details. When the form is submitted, these hidden values are captured and sent to Heap along with the user’s form data—such as name, email, and company—where they become available as User Properties.
- Extract data from the cookie – With just a small JavaScript snippet, you can pull UTM and attribution data directly from the Attributer cookie and send it to Heap as User Properties. This method is especially useful when using social login options like “Sign up with Google” or “Sign up with Facebook,” where users can register without completing a traditional form.
4. Run reports in Heap Analytics
With your UTM parameters and other attribution data now integrated into Heap, you can begin generating reports and creating dashboards that highlight essential customer acquisition metrics—such as signups, activations, and customers—segmented by marketing channels and campaigns.
This enables you to answer questions like:
- What is the number of signups generated from my Google Ads?
- Which Twitter advertising campaigns yielded the highest signup rates?
- How many users activated their accounts through our Facebook Ads?
- What is the retention rate for users coming from LinkedIn ads?
- How many customers have resulted from our blogging initiatives?
- How many customers did our SEO efforts attract?
- And many other insights
Why using Attributer is better than capturing raw UTM parameters
There are various methods to import UTM parameters into Heap Analytics, but what sets Attributer apart as the superior option?
Beyond simply collecting raw UTM data, Attributer offers additional capabilities, including:
- Tracks all visitor traffic
In addition to capturing UTM parameters and sending them to your analytics platforms, Attributer also identifies the channels of visitors arriving via sources that lack UTM tags, such as Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct traffic, and Referrals.
This ensures you have a complete view of where all your visitors originate, unlike conventional methods that only record data from UTM-tagged campaigns.
- Retains the attribution data
Many other methods for capturing UTM parameters rely on the parameters being present in the URL of the page where the user completes the form. This causes issues when the signup happens on a different page than the user originally landed on.
For example, a user clicks on your Facebook Ad and lands on a campaign-specific landing page.
After exploring the product details, they hit the ‘Create An Account’ button and are redirected to a separate signup page.
Since the form submission occurs on a different page than the initial landing, the UTM parameters are lost.
Attributer solves this by storing the UTM data in a cookie within the visitor’s browser, ensuring these parameters persist and are sent to Heap regardless of which page the signup happens on.
- Ensures cleaner data quality
If you’ve ever handled UTM parameters before, you know how chaotic the data can become, especially when ads are managed by multiple people or agencies.
For example, some of your Google Ads campaigns might use UTM_Source=Google while others use UTM_Source=adwords.
Most tools that simply relay raw UTM parameters would treat these as separate signup sources in Heap Analytics reports, requiring you to manually consolidate them.
Thankfully, Attributer is built to handle these discrepancies and will accurately attribute all signups to the appropriate channel (Paid Search), despite inconsistent UTM tagging.
- Also tracks landing page details
Like many digital product companies, you probably maintain a blog and invest in content marketing to boost user acquisition.
But how can you determine if your blogging and content efforts are truly generating signups and customers?
Attributer helps here as well. Besides capturing UTM parameters and channel info, it records the landing page URL along with its category (e.g., /blog).
This landing page information allows you to evaluate the performance of various sections of your website—such as your blog—in terms of signups and customer acquisition, and even lets you analyze how individual blog posts contribute to your acquisition goals.
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