Tracking Cookies for Advocate Programs

Advocate uses first-party cookies for referral attribution—the process of connecting a referred friend to the customer advocate who made the referral. The cookies are based on UTM parameters passed through the URL. By placing the UTT on your landing page, it is able to read the UTM parameters and create a valid first-party cookie that’s in compliance with all browsers.

Set up first-party cookies

We recommend that all implementations that make use of our referral cookie adhere to the following instructions to enable usage of first-party cookies:

Add the UTT to your landing page. This sets the first-party cookie.
Place the UTT on the signup page where your participants are upserted. This reads the first-party cookie.

Here’s how it works:

The UTT reads _saasquatch from the URL and stores a first-party cookie on the specified landing page's domain.
It automatically sets the cookies field on users during an upsert.
It reads the first-party cookie during use of autofill.

Attribution Preference Hierarchy

As there are several ways to attribute a referred friend to a customer advocate, the connection will always be linked following the below scheme:

Explicit inclusion of a referredByCodes either via UTT or the REST API will always override any identified cookie.
If a referral code is not included directly with a user upsert, then UTT will look for the first-party cookie and make the attribution.
If no first-party cookie exists and a third-party cookie is available through a compatible browser, the 3rd-party cookie will be detected and applied.