The Prop Firm CRM Checklist for Marketing

B2B marketing commentary. Not investment advice, and not a recommendation to trade or to use any broker, exchange or prop firm.

Search “prop firm CRM” and you’ll mostly find people selling one. On September 25, 2026, eight of Google’s top ten results in the US were CRM vendors’ own pages, and the other two were “best CRM” lists. Their pages are about evaluations, payouts, risk rules and KYC.

This checklist covers the part those pages mostly skip. It’s what your CRM has to record so marketing can see what a challenge costs to sell, channel by channel. It names no vendor. We don’t sell CRMs, and the fields matter more than the brand.

What does a prop firm CRM need to do for marketing?

A prop firm CRM has to tie every paid challenge to the ad, affiliate or email that sold it, and keep that link through retries, refunds and chargebacks. If it does, you can report cost per challenge sold by channel and send real sales back to the ad platforms. If it doesn’t, you’re guessing from ad dashboards.

Cost per challenge sold is the number the CRM has to support

Cost per challenge sold is what you spend to sell challenges in a month, divided by the challenges you sold. The spend is ads, agency and creative fees, and what you pay affiliates and comparison sites. Count every paid challenge, first try or retry, and report the two apart. Take refunded and charged-back challenges out of the count. Our prop firm marketing playbook calls it cost per challenge purchase. It’s the same number.

A fee you hand back with a trader’s first payout is different. The sale happened, so log that refund as a payout cost on the order, and keep the sale in the count.

Your ad platform sees the click, and the payment processor sees the money. The affiliate platform sees the coupon, and the email tool sees the retry. Each marketing tool claims the sales it can see, so their totals can add up to more sales than you made.

The CRM is where those pieces should meet, on one trader and one order. That takes a decision about which fields to keep, made before the next campaign goes live.

The fields a prop firm CRM must capture

Some fields belong on the trader, because they describe how that person first found you. Others belong on each order, because a trader can buy more than once, through a different channel each time. The first visit comes before any sign-up, so those fields start on an anonymous visitor ID and move to the trader later.

Field	Keep it on	Why marketing needs it
Click IDs from the first visit, with the time you first saw each: GCLID and WBRAID from Google, fbclid from Meta	The visitor, then the trader	Ties the sale to the ad click, and feeds your uploads
UTM tags, landing page and referrer from the first visit	The visitor, then the trader, never written over	Shows which channel found the trader, even organic and direct visits with no tags
The click ID or UTM tags present at checkout	Each order	Credits a retry to the ad or email that brought it back
One ID from the first visit, carried through sign-up and checkout	Both	Joins the order to the lead, whatever email the trader pays with
Affiliate ID, coupon code and who owns the code	Each order	Shows when an affiliate’s coupon lands on an ad click, and which commission is owed
Order ID, time and time zone, challenge, account size, currency, list price, discount and price paid	Each order	Revenue and price mix by channel, and the IDs to adjust a conversion later
Order type: first purchase, retry, reset, add-on or free	Each order	Splits new buyers from repeat buyers, and keeps free accounts out of the count
Refund or chargeback, with the date, amount and reason	Each order	Takes returned sales out, and keeps a fee handed back with a payout apart from a refund
Event ID for each purchase	Each order	Lets Meta drop the duplicate when its Pixel and its Conversions API report the same sale
Consent choice and its date	The trader	Google asks for consent where the law requires it, and recommends a consent status on every upload
Passed, failed or funded	Each challenge	A second read on traffic quality

UTM tags only help if the names stay the same. Our free UTM builder helps your team tag every link the same way.

Where the trail breaks between the ad click and the paid challenge

Take a made-up trader. She clicks your Google ad on a Monday and signs up with her work email. On Friday she comes back through an affiliate’s review, pays with her personal email and types the affiliate’s discount code. She fails the challenge, and three weeks later your email brings her back for a retry.

Your ad platform saw a click. The affiliate platform saw a coupon sale, and your email tool saw a retry. Unless one record joins them, three channels claim her, or none of them do.

The checkout runs on another domain

If your landing pages sit on one domain and your checkout on another, the tags stay behind unless you carry them. Google’s help page on cross-domain measurement spells out the cost. Without it, one visitor who crosses root domains shows up as “two users and two sessions instead of one user and one session.”

Fix it in two places. Set up cross-domain measurement in your analytics. Then save the click IDs and UTM tags against a first-party visitor ID at the first page view. Pass that ID in the checkout link, and copy the tags onto the trader at sign-up or checkout, whichever comes first.

The trader pays with a different email

If your CRM matches orders to leads by email, a trader who signs up with one address and pays with another becomes two people. The order loses its source.

Match on the ID you carried from the first visit instead. The order then joins the right record, whatever email it carries.

An affiliate’s coupon lands on someone who clicked your ad

Discount codes travel. A trader who clicked your ad can find an affiliate’s code on a coupon site and type it at checkout. If your rules credit the coupon, the affiliate gets the sale and the commission, and your ad looks worse than it is.

Store the click ID, the coupon code and the code’s owner in separate fields on the order. Write down which one gets the credit when a click and an affiliate’s code arrive together, and report how often it happens.

A retry comes weeks later

A retry is a real sale, and it can have a different source from the first purchase. If the CRM keeps only the first source, the first ad gets the credit for a sale an email made.

Browsers can make this worse. In February 2019, Apple’s WebKit team capped cookies set by page scripts at seven days in Safari. In April it cut that to one day for some visitors. It covers people sent by a domain WebKit classifies as a cross-site tracker, through a link with a query string. If the first source lives only in a cookie like that, a purchase a week later, or even the next day, can arrive with no source.

Save the first source on the trader, and give every order its own source.

Some iOS clicks arrive without a GCLID

Google says the GCLID “is no longer used without user consent in iOS14+.” In its place, a click from an ad in an iOS app to your website carries a WBRAID. A click from the web into your iOS app carries a GBRAID. If your forms save only the GCLID, the WBRAID clicks land with an empty field. Save the WBRAID on web forms, and the GBRAID too if your iOS app sells challenges.

A payment clears after the trader has left

If you take crypto or bank transfers, the payment can clear after the trader has closed the tab. A tag on the thank-you page may never fire, so the ad platform never hears about the sale.

Record the sale when the payment clears, from the payment system to the CRM, and send it to the ad platforms from there. Meta’s docs say an event’s time “can be up to 7 days before you send” it, so a slow payment still needs a quick upload.

Refunds never reach the ad platform

A refund that stays in the payment system leaves the sale counted everywhere else. Google lets you retract an uploaded conversion, and it wants an order ID on each conversion so you can find the right one. Its help page gives you “up to 7 days after they’re first recorded for autobidding readability,” and 54 days overall. Only a refund inside the first week changes the bidding. Later ones still fix your reports, up to Google’s 54-day limit. Google also suggests waiting at least 24 hours after the original conversion before you adjust it.

Sync each refund and chargeback to its order in the CRM, and send the retraction as soon as the refund posts.

How do you send a paid challenge back to Google and Meta?

Save the click ID with the order. Then upload each paid challenge as a conversion, with its order ID, value and time. For Google, that’s an offline conversion import or enhanced conversions for leads, using the GCLID and a hashed email. For Meta, send the purchase through the Conversions API, with an fbc value built from the fbclid.

Google’s help page on offline conversion imports says you’ll “save these IDs along with whatever lead information you collect.” That’s the CRM’s job. The same page tells you to “get consent where required by law or any applicable Google policies governing user consent.” So upload a trader’s click ID and hashed email only where their consent allows it.

Google asks for GCLIDs with your uploads “whenever possible,” and requires them if no tag collects the user-provided data. Since June 15, 2026, Google routes these uploads through its Data Manager API. It says developer tokens that sent no requests from January to June 2026 won’t get legacy access to the old route. Build new setups through Data Manager. Our tracking guide walks through the Google side step by step, and our free conversion tracking checklist covers the tags.

Meta’s developer docs say, “We recommend sending the fbc parameter with every event you send to the Conversions API.” The fbc value is built from the fbclid and the time you first saw it, so save both at the first visit. Meta also needs the page address for website events. It removes a duplicate when the Pixel and the Conversions API send the same event name and event ID.

Count each sale once. If a tag already records purchases on your site, don’t upload the same sale to a second Google conversion action that also feeds bidding. Google calls primary actions the ones “used for bidding,” and secondary actions “for observation only.”

Send the paid challenge, because that’s the sale. A funded account is a trader who passed, and at a prop firm that’s where payouts start.

Upload each order with the click ID saved on that order. A retry that came from an email shouldn’t borrow the first click. Send retries as their own conversion action, set as secondary, so you can watch them without bidding on them until you decide they should count.

What to look for in prop firm CRM software

Vendor pages lead with operations. For marketing, take these questions into the demo, and ask to see each one working.

1. Can it store custom fields on the trader and on each order, and can your developers write to them through an API?
2. Does it save the click IDs and UTM tags from the first page view, before sign-up, or only what someone typed into a form?
3. Does it keep the first source on the trader and a separate source on every order?
4. Can one order hold an affiliate ID, a coupon code and the code’s owner at the same time, and can you report where a click and a code both appear?
5. Does it send an event when an order is paid, refunded or charged back, so you can pass it to the ad platforms?
6. Can you export raw orders with their IDs and timestamps? A summary report won’t let you rebuild the numbers.
7. Does it store each trader’s consent choice with a date?
8. Who owns the data, and what does a full export cost when you leave?
9. Can it send each sale to your affiliate platform server to server, so commissions don’t depend on a browser pixel?

An enterprise prop firm CRM, running several brands or markets, needs three more things. Put the brand and market on every record. Keep one trader ID across brands. And let marketing see orders without seeing KYC documents.

In a trial, make one test purchase through each channel, and check that each one lands with the right fields. That test tells you more than the feature list.

The prop firm CRM migration checklist

A CRM switch is where attribution history can go missing. Use this list next to your vendor’s own plan.

Before the switch:

1. Ask your current provider for a full export early. Include traders, orders, refunds, coupons, affiliate IDs, click IDs and UTM tags, with raw timestamps, plus the log of what you uploaded to Google and Meta.
2. Map every marketing field to the new system, and keep the old IDs in a legacy field.
3. Keep your order IDs, or keep a map from old to new. A refund that lands after the switch has to match the conversion you sent to Google, and the order ID is the simplest match.
4. List every system that writes to the CRM or reads from it. That’s your landing pages, checkout, payment processors, affiliate platform, email tool, trading platform and reports. During the parallel run, have each one write to both systems.
5. Keep the same conversion actions in Google and the same dataset in Meta, and point the new CRM’s uploads at them.
6. Freeze new UTM names during the switch, and give any new coupon code an owner in both systems.

During the switch:

1. Run both systems side by side. Compare challenges sold per day by channel, revenue, refunds and coupon use, and explain every gap before you cut over.
2. Make a test purchase through each channel, a Google ad, a Meta ad, an affiliate link, a coupon and an email, plus one payment that clears late. Check that each one lands with the right fields.
3. Watch each ad platform’s upload diagnostics for failed or unmatched uploads.

After the switch:

1. Keep the old system read-only until you’ve closed a full month in the new one.
2. Compare cost per challenge sold by channel for the month before and the month after. If one channel jumps, check the tracking before you credit or blame the channel.

FAQ

Start with 10 orders

Pull 10 challenges you sold last week. Trace each one back to the click, coupon or email that brought the buyer. The ones you can’t trace show you where your trail breaks, and which fields to add first.

If you want us to look at your setup, our free audit sends three findings by email within two business days. Each one names the problem, why it matters in dollars and the first move we’d make. No call is needed.