How to track lead conversion events with Appwrite and Dub

Tip

This feature is only available on Business plans and above.

When it comes to conversion tracking, a lead event happens when a user performs an action that indicates interest in your product or service. This could be anything from:

Signing up for an account
Booking a demo meeting
Joining a mailing list

A diagram showing how lead events are tracked in the conversion funnel

In this guide, we will be focusing on tracking new user sign-ups for a SaaS application that uses Appwrite for user authentication.

Prerequisites#

First, you'll need to enable conversion tracking for your Dub links to be able to start tracking conversions:

Tip

If you're using Dub Partners, you can skip this step since partner links will have conversion tracking enabled by default.

Option 1: On a workspace-level

To enable conversion tracking for all future links in a workspace, you can do the following: To enable conversion tracking for all future links in a workspace, you can do the following:

Navigate to your workspace's Tracking settings page.
Toggle the Workspace-level Conversion Tracking switch to enable conversion tracking for the workspace.

Enabling conversion tracking for a workspace

This option will enable conversion tracking in the Dub Link Builder for all future links.

Option 2: On a link-level

If you don't want to enable conversion tracking for all your links in a workspace, you can also opt to enable it on a link-level.

To enable conversion tracking for a specific link, open the Dub Link Builder for a link and toggle the Conversion Tracking switch.

Tip

You can also use the C keyboard shortcut when inside the link builder to quickly enable conversion tracking for a given link.

Option 3: Via the API

Alternatively, you can also enable conversion tracking programmatically via the Dub API. All you need to do is pass trackConversion: true when creating or updating a link:

const link = await dub.links.create({  url: "https://dub.co",  trackConversion: true,});

Then, you'd want to install the Dub Analytics script to your website to track conversion events.

You can install the Dub Analytics script in several different ways:

Check

You can verify the installation with the following tests:

Open the browser console and type in _dubAnalytics – if the script is installed correctly, you should see the _dubAnalytics object in the console.
Add the ?dub_id=test query parameter to your website URL and make sure that the dub_id cookie is being set in your browser.

If both of these checks pass, the script is installed correctly. Otherwise, please make sure:

The analytics script was added to the <head> section of the page
If you're using a content delivery network (CDN), make sure to purge any cached content

Configure Appwrite#

Next, configure Appwrite to track lead conversion events during the sign up process.

Create an Appwrite Cloud project

Head to Appwrite Cloud and create a new project.

Create a new API key with the sessions.write scope enabled and save the API key for later use. You can also copy your project ID and endpoint from the project's Settings page.

API key in your project on Appwrite Cloud

Then, in your Next.js app, install the Appwrite Node.js SDK.

npm i node-appwrite

Add environment variables

Add the following environment variables to your app.

NEXT_PUBLIC_APPWRITE_ENDPOINT=https://cloud.appwrite.io/v1NEXT_PUBLIC_APPWRITE_PROJECT=<APPWRITE_PROJECT_ID>NEXT_APPWRITE_KEY=<APPWRITE_API_KEY>NEXT_DUB_API_KEY=<DUB_API_KEY>

Integrate Dub Analytics

Add the DubAnalytics component from the @dub/analytics package to your app’s root layout.

src/app/layout.tsx

import type { Metadata } from 'next';import { Analytics as DubAnalytics } from '@dub/analytics/react';export const metadata: Metadata = {  title: 'Appwrite Dub Leads Example',  description: 'Appwrite Dub Leads Tracking example app with Next.js'};export default function RootLayout({  children}: Readonly<{  children: React.ReactNode;}>) {  return (    <html lang="en">      <body>{children}</body>      <DubAnalytics />    </html>  );}

Prepare the Appwrite client and auth library

Create the Appwrite Session and Admin client (necessary for SSR apps, as explained in the Appwrite docs). Additionally, create a function to verify user login.

src/lib/server/appwrite.ts

'use server';import { Client, Account } from 'node-appwrite';import { cookies } from 'next/headers';export async function createSessionClient() {  const client = new Client()    .setEndpoint(process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_APPWRITE_ENDPOINT as string)    .setProject(process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_APPWRITE_PROJECT as string);  const session = (await cookies()).get('my-custom-session');  if (!session || !session.value) {    throw new Error('No session');  }  client.setSession(session.value);  return {    get account() {      return new Account(client);    }  };}export async function createAdminClient() {  const client = new Client()    .setEndpoint(process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_APPWRITE_ENDPOINT as string)    .setProject(process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_APPWRITE_PROJECT as string)    .setKey(process.env.NEXT_APPWRITE_KEY as string);  return {    get account() {      return new Account(client);    }  };}

Set up Dub SDK

Create the Dub client and send leads to Dub using the dub.track.lead() function.

src/lib/server/dub.ts

import type { Models } from 'node-appwrite';import { Dub } from 'dub';const dub = new Dub({  token: process.env.NEXT_DUB_API_KEY});export function addDubLead(user: Models.User<Models.Preferences>, dub_id: string) {  dub.track.lead({    clickId: dub_id,    eventName: 'Sign Up',    customerExternalId: user.$id,    customerName: user.name,    customerEmail: user.email  });}

Send leads to Dub on user signup

In the /auth page, use the Appwrite Admin client to allow users to sign up. Post sign up, check if the dub_id cookie is present, send a lead event to Dub if found, and delete the dub_id cookie.

src/app/auth/page.tsx

import { ID } from 'node-appwrite';import { createAdminClient, getLoggedInUser } from '@/lib/server/appwrite';import { cookies } from 'next/headers';import { redirect } from 'next/navigation';import { addDubLead } from '@/lib/server/dub';async function signUpWithEmail(formData: any) {  'use server';  // Get sign up info from form  const email = formData.get('email');  const password = formData.get('password');  const name = formData.get('name');  // Create account and session using Appwrite  const { account } = await createAdminClient();  const user = await account.create(ID.unique(), email, password, name);  const session = await account.createEmailPasswordSession(email, password);  (await cookies()).set('my-custom-session', session.secret, {    path: '/',    httpOnly: true,    sameSite: 'strict',    secure: true  });  // Check if Dub ID is present in cookies and track lead if found  const dub_id = (await cookies()).get('dub_id')?.value;  if (dub_id) {    addDubLead(user, dub_id);    (await cookies()).delete('dub_id');  }  // Redirect to success page  redirect('/auth/success');}export default async function SignUpPage() {  // Verify active user session and redirect to success page if found  const user = await getLoggedInUser();  if (user) redirect('/auth/success');  return (    <>      <form action={signUpWithEmail}>        <input id="email" name="email" placeholder="Email" type="email" required />        <input id="password" name="password" placeholder="Password" minLength={8} type="password" required />        <input id="name" name="name" placeholder="Name" type="text" required />        <button type="submit">Sign up</button>      </form>    </>  );}

Here are the properties you can include when sending a lead event:

Property	Required	Description
`clickId`	Yes	The unique ID of the click that the lead conversion event is attributed to. You can read this value from `dub_id` cookie. If an empty string is provided (i.e. if you're using tracking a deferred lead event), Dub will try to find an existing customer with the provided `customerExternalId` and use the `clickId` from the customer if found.
`eventName`	Yes	The name of the lead event to track. Can also be used as a unique identifier to associate a given lead event for a customer for a subsequent sale event (via the `leadEventName` prop in `/track/sale`).
`customerExternalId`	Yes	The unique ID of the customer in your system. Will be used to identify and attribute all future events to this customer.
`customerName`	No	The name of the customer. If not passed, a random name will be generated (e.g. "Big Red Caribou").
`customerEmail`	No	The email address of the customer.
`customerAvatar`	No	The avatar URL of the customer.
`mode`	No	The mode to use for tracking the lead event. `async` will not block the request; `wait` will block the request until the lead event is fully recorded in Dub; `deferred` will defer the lead event creation to a subsequent request.
`metadata`	No	Additional metadata to be stored with the lead event. Max 10,000 characters.

Example App#

To learn more about how to track leads with Appwrite, check out the following example app:

Appwrite + Dub Next.js Example

See how to track new user sign-ups with Appwrite and the Dub SDK.

View your conversions#

Once you've completed the setup, all your tracked conversions will show up in Dub Analytics. We provide 3 different views to help you understand your conversions:

Time-series: A time-series view of the number clicks, leads and sales.

Funnel chart: A funnel chart view visualizing the conversion & dropoff rates across the different steps in the conversion funnel (clicks → leads → sales).

Funnel chart view showing the conversion & dropoff rates from clicks → leads → sales

Real-time events stream: A real-time events stream of every single conversion event that occurs across all your links in your workspace.