Server-side tracking

Learn how to track lead conversion events with Dub using server-side tracking

Conversion tracking require a Business plan subscription or higher.

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
• Adding a product to cart
• Joining a mailing list

In this guide, we will be focusing on tracking new user sign-ups for a SaaS application as lead events on Dub.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, make sure you follow the Dub Conversions quickstart guide to get Dub Conversions set up for your links:

1. Enable conversion tracking for your links
2. Install the @dub/analytics client-side SDK
3. Install the Dub server-side SDK

Configure lead tracking

Depending on which authentication framework you’re using, we have a few pre-built guides to help you track lead events when a new user signs up for your SaaS application:

Clerk

Better Auth

NextAuth.js

Supabase

Auth0

Appwrite

If you’re using the Remix framework, you might run into an issue where you get an empty/null value for the dub_id cookie. In that case, try using a library like cookie instead:

import cookie from "cookie";

const cookies = cookie.parse(request.headers.get("cookie") ?? "");
const dubId = cookies.dub_id;

If you’re not using any of the frameworks listed above, you can use the following steps to track lead events:

1. Within the sign-up API request, retrieve the dub_id cookie that was created by the @dub/analytics client-SDK.
2. Send an event to the Dub API with the dub_id value, as well as your customer’s ID and any other relevant information (email, name, avatar, etc.)

If you don’t have a customer ID, you can also use the customer’s email instead.

Code examples

Here are some examples of how you can track lead events using our native SDKs:

Node.js

import { Dub } from "dub";

const dub = new Dub();

const dubId = req.cookies["dub_id"];
if (dubId) {
  await dub.track.lead({
    clickId: dubId,
    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),
  });
}

Here’s the full list of attributes you can pass when sending a lead event:

Property	Required	Description
clickId	Yes	The unique dub_id parameter that the lead conversion event is attributed to.
eventName	Yes	The name of the event. Example: “Sign up”.
customerExternalId	Yes	The unique ID of the customer in your system. Will be used to identify and attribute all future events to this customer.
customerEmail	No	The email address of the customer. If not passed, a random email address will be generated.
customerName	No	The name of the customer. If not passed, a random name will be generated (e.g. “Big Red Caribou”).
customerAvatar	No	The avatar URL of the customer. If not passed, a random avatar URL will be generated.

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).

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