How to track lead conversion events with Clerk and Dub

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 Clerk for user authentication.

Prerequisites

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

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.

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,
});

link = d.links.create(url="https://dub.co", track_conversion=True)

link, err := d.Links.Create(ctx, &dub.CreateLinkRequest{
    URL: "https://dub.co",
    TrackConversion: true,
})

s.links.create_many(
  ::OpenApiSDK::Operations::CreateLinkRequest.new(
    url: "https://dub.co",
    track_conversion: 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:

React

Manual installation

Framer

Shopify

WordPress

Webflow

Google Tag Manager

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 Clerk

Next, configure Clerk to track lead conversion events when a new user signs up. Here’s a quick video showing how to do this:

Here’s a quick summary of the steps:

Add environment variables

Add the following environment variables to your app:

# get it here: https://dashboard.clerk.com/apps/new
NEXT_PUBLIC_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY=your_publishable_key
CLERK_SECRET_KEY=your_secret_key

# get it here: https://d.to/tokens
DUB_API_KEY=your_api_key

Add a custom claim to your Clerk session token

Add the following JSON as a custom claim to your Clerk session token:

Clerk Session Token

{
  "metadata": "{{user.public_metadata}}"
}

Extend the `@dub/analytics` package with Clerk's `useUser` hook

Extend the @dub/analytics package to include a trackLead server action.

components/dub-analytics.tsx

"use client";

import { trackLead } from "@/actions/track-lead";
import { useUser } from "@clerk/nextjs";
import { Analytics, AnalyticsProps } from "@dub/analytics/react";
import { useEffect } from "react";

export function DubAnalytics(props: AnalyticsProps) {
  const { user } = useUser();

  useEffect(() => {
    if (!user || user.publicMetadata.dubClickId) return;

    // if the user is loaded but hasn't been persisted to Dub yet, track the lead event
    trackLead({
      id: user.id,
      name: user.fullName!,
      email: user.primaryEmailAddress?.emailAddress,
      avatar: user.imageUrl,
    }).then(async (res) => {
      if (res.ok) await user.reload();
      else console.error(res.error);
    });

    // you can also use an API route instead of a server action
    /*
    fetch("/api/track-lead", {
      method: "POST",
      body: JSON.stringify({
        id: user.id,
        name: user.fullName,
        email: user.primaryEmailAddress?.emailAddress,
        avatar: user.imageUrl,
      }),
    }).then(res => {
      if (res.ok) await user.reload();
      else console.error(res.statusText);
    });
    */
  }, [user]);

  return <Analytics {...props} />;
}

Then, add the DubAnalytics component to your app’s root layout component:

app/layout.tsx

import { DubAnalytics } from "@/components/dub-analytics";

export default function RootLayout({ children }: { children: React.ReactNode }) {
  return (
    <html>
      <body>
        <DubAnalytics />
        {children}
      </body>
    </html>
  );
}

Implement the `trackLead` server action

On the server side, implement the trackLead server action. Alternatively, you can also create an API route instead:

// This is a server action
"use server";

import { dub } from "@/lib/dub";
import { clerkClient } from "@clerk/nextjs/server";
import { cookies } from "next/headers";

export async function trackLead({
  id,
  name,
  email,
  avatar,
}: {
  id: string;
  name?: string | null;
  email?: string | null;
  avatar?: string | null;
}) {
  try {
    const cookieStore = await cookies();
    const dubId = cookieStore.get("dub_id")?.value;

    if (dubId) {
      // Send lead event to Dub
      await dub.track.lead({
        clickId: dubId,
        eventName: "Sign Up",
        customerExternalId: id,
        customerName: name,
        customerEmail: email,
        customerAvatar: avatar,
      });

      // Delete the dub_id cookie
      cookieStore.set("dub_id", "", {
        expires: new Date(0),
      });
    }

    const clerk = await clerkClient();
    await clerk.users.updateUser(id, {
      publicMetadata: {
        dubClickId: dubId || "n/a",
      },
    });

    return { ok: true };
  } catch (error) {
    console.error("Error in trackLead:", error);
    return { ok: false, error: (error as Error).message };
  }
}

// This is an API route
import { NextRequest, NextResponse } from "next/server";

export async function POST(req: NextRequest) {
  // read dub_id from the request cookies
  const dubId = req.cookies.get("dub_id")?.value;
  if (dubId) {
    // Send lead event to Dub
    await dub.track.lead({
      clickId: dubId,
      eventName: "Sign Up",
      customerExternalId: id,
      customerName: name,
      customerEmail: email,
      customerAvatar: avatar,
    });
  }

  const clerk = await clerkClient();
  await clerk.users.updateUser(id, {
    publicMetadata: {
      dubClickId: dubId || "n/a",
    },
  });
  const res = NextResponse.json({ ok: true });
  // Delete the dub_id cookie
  res.cookies.set("dub_id", "", {
    expires: new Date(0),
  });
  return res;
}

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 Clerk, check out the following example app:

Dub + Clerk Example App

See how to track new user sign-ups with Clerk 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.

GETTING STARTED

CONCEPTS

INTEGRATIONS

OPEN SOURCE

Clerk

Prerequisites

React

Manual installation

Framer

Shopify

WordPress

Webflow

Google Tag Manager

Configure Clerk

Example App

Dub + Clerk Example App

View your conversions

​Prerequisites

React

Manual installation

Framer

Shopify

WordPress

Webflow

Google Tag Manager

​Configure Clerk

​Example App

Dub + Clerk Example App

​View your conversions

Prerequisites

Configure Clerk

Example App

View your conversions