Deferred lead tracking

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

However, there are times where signups alone might not be the clearest indicator of a lead conversion event. For instance, you might want to track a more meaningful lead event such as:

A user completing their first meeting on Granola
A user making their first search query on Perplexity
A user dictating their first 2,000 words on Wispr Flow

In these cases, you can use deferred lead tracking to defer the actual lead event creation to a subsequent request:

A diagram showing how deferred lead tracking works

Tip

Deferred lead tracking is particularly useful for tracking sales-qualified leads (SQLs) – both for marketing attribution purposes, as well as to make sure that you're rewarding partners for qualified leads (instead of just pure signups) with Dub Partners.

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

Step 1: Track a deferred lead event#

First, when the user completes the action that indicates interest in your product or service, you'll need to track a deferred lead event. Examples include:

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

To do this, you'll need to set the mode property to deferred when tracking the lead event. With this, Dub will still track the customer and the click ID they came from, but defer the actual lead event creation to a subsequent request.

import { Dub } from "dub";const dub = new Dub();const dubId = req.cookies["dub_id"];if (dubId) {  await dub.track.lead({    clickId: dubId,    mode: "deferred",    eventName: "Sign Up",    customerExternalId: customer.id,    customerName: customer.name,    customerEmail: customer.email,    customerAvatar: customer.avatar,  });  // delete the dub_id cookie  res.cookies.set("dub_id", "", {    expires: new Date(0),  });}

Step 2: Track a qualified lead event#

Once the user completes the action that makes them a qualified lead, you can then track a qualified lead event. To do this, you'll repeat the same lead tracking request as before, but without the mode property and by setting the clickId property to an empty string.

import { Dub } from "dub";const dub = new Dub();await dub.track.lead({  clickId: "",  eventName: "Sign Up",  customerExternalId: customer.id,  customerName: customer.name,  customerEmail: customer.email,  customerAvatar: customer.avatar,});

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.