Install Bread & Butter on REACH by RentCafe

REACH by RentCafe is Yardi's marketing and website platform for multifamily properties, part of the broader RentCafe family, and someone browsing floorplans or starting an application, before or after they lease, is a real intent signal. Bread & Butter connects that traffic to the rest of your visitor data. One script, no plugin.

In short: One script connects your REACH by RentCafe website to Bread & Butter, with no plugin and no developer required. It shows you who is a genuine prospective renter rather than just a pageview, and maps their journey from browsing through application. It also solves the problem most property marketing teams arrive with: Yardi strips UTM parameters when a prospect is redirected into the RentCafe or SecureCafe leasing flow, and Yardi's own reporting maps every lead into a short list of ambiguous source buckets. Bread & Butter records the raw, unmapped UTMs, the full landing URL and the real referrer on the first page where they still exist, and binds them to that visitor's profile. The UTM does not have to survive the redirect, because the profile does.

A quick naming note. "RentCafe" covers several distinct Yardi products. REACH by RentCafe is the prospect-facing marketing website, and it is what this guide is for. It is separate from RentCafe CRM IQ, an internal leasing-team tool, and from the centralised RentCafe.com listing site. SecureCafe is the host that application and resident portal pages commonly resolve to.

Why your UTMs disappear on RentCafe and SecureCafe

Your property site, your application flow and your resident portal are often three different hosts. A prospect clicks a paid ad carrying utm_source , utm_medium , utm_campaign , utm_term  and utm_content , lands on the property site, then gets redirected into a Yardi-hosted page on a securecafe.com  or rentcafe.com  address to apply or book a tour. Query parameters are not carried through that redirect. By the time the page a renter actually converts on has loaded, the URL is clean and the campaign data is gone.

Yardi's own lead source reporting does not fill the gap, because it maps inbound leads into a small fixed set of source values. A Google Ads click, a paid social click and a link in your own newsletter can all land in the same bucket. You end up able to say leads came from "the internet" and not much more, which is no use when you are deciding what to spend next month.

Neither of these is a misconfiguration you can fix inside Yardi. The redirect behaviour and the source mapping are how the platform works.

What Bread & Butter captures instead

The fix is not to make the parameters survive the redirect. It is to stop depending on the URL at the point of conversion.

Raw UTMs, unmapped. All five parameters are recorded exactly as they arrived, with no translation into a source category of ours. What you put in the link is what you get back out.

The full landing URL and the real referrer. Not a bucket. The actual page they arrived on and the actual site that sent them, which is the pair Yardi's reporting collapses.

First touch and last touch, both kept. The ad that found them originally and the link that brought them back on the visit where they converted are stored separately on the same profile, so a renter who saw a paid ad in March and came back through organic search in May is not credited entirely to either one.

One profile across every host you run. This is the part that matters here. When they submit an application on a securecafe.com  page, that lead carries the campaign data captured on the very first page they ever landed on, even though the page they converted on never saw a single parameter.

Through to the signed lease. Mark the lead Won/Closed when they sign, and the Attribution report ties that lease back to the campaign, the keyword and the landing page that started it. That is the number worth having: not cost per lead, but cost per renter who actually moved in.

Making sure there is something to capture

Bread & Butter can only record a parameter that reached a page at least once. If a campaign points directly at a securecafe.com  URL and Yardi drops the parameters before anything renders, there was never a moment where the data existed in the browser, and no script of ours or anyone else's can recover it.

Point paid traffic at a page that keeps its query string, normally your own marketing or property site rather than straight into the leasing flow. Then the first touch is captured cleanly and the redirect afterwards does not matter.

To confirm where in the chain the parameters are being dropped, open a campaign link with the UTMs attached and watch the address bar through each redirect. The step where the query string disappears is the step to work around.

What you see once it is running

Bread & Butter watches how visitors engage with your property website, not just how many pages loaded, and surfaces that alongside everything else a visitor does, connecting browsing behaviour to booking intent instead of leaving it as disconnected traffic.

Installation Steps

Installation is a copy-and-paste step into your property's SEO Dashboard, the same place you would add Google Analytics or a similar tracking tool. No developer is required.

One thing to check first: Yardi does not publish self-serve pricing or plan documentation, so we have not been able to confirm whether this varies by contract tier. The SEO Dashboard where the tracking script goes may require administrator-level permissions on your account, and on some contracts the change goes through Yardi support. Check with whoever manages your property's RentCafe access if you do not see it.

Step 1: Get your tracking script

  • Open your Bread & Butter dashboard
  • Go to Settings > App & Domains
  • Add your property's REACH by RentCafe subdomain or custom domain
  • Copy the JavaScript tracking snippet provided, which includes your unique App ID

Either kind of address works. The tracking script is embedded in the page itself, so it behaves the same way whether your property website is published under a custom domain or a rentcafe.com subdomain. Some hosting scenarios may need a slightly different setup for your website builder; if the steps below do not match what you see, check with your Yardi representative.

If you are already using Google Tag Manager on your property website, this is the easiest and most reliable way to install Bread & Butter, and it is the method we recommend. See our full Google Tag Manager installation guide for more detail.

Step 2: Add the script as a GTM tag

  • In your GTM container, create a new tag and choose Custom HTML
  • Paste the Bread & Butter tracking snippet into the tag
  • Set the trigger to All Pages
  • Save and Submit to publish the container

Step 3: Confirm it's working

  • Open your live property website in a new browser or incognito window
  • Return to your Bread & Butter Dashboard and confirm visitor data is coming in

Alternative: Manual install via SEO Dashboard

If you are not using Google Tag Manager, install directly in RentCafe instead.

  • Open RentCafe and select your property
  • Go to Property Configuration > SEO > SEO Dashboard
  • Open Analytics Tracking
  • In the Other Tracking section, click + Add New Item
  • Name it "Bread & Butter" and paste the tracking script into the head field
  • Save

Then confirm it the same way: open your live property website in a new browser or incognito window, and check that visitor data is arriving in your dashboard.

Running across separate domains

Separate domains are common here, for example a custom property domain alongside a rentcafe.com subdomain, or an application flow that resolves to RentCafe.com or SecureCafe.

Bread & Butter does not use cookies. It uses a first-party key stored locally in the visitor's own browser, so installing the same tracking script on each domain lets Bread & Butter reconcile the activity into one visitor journey, even across different platforms. Add each host under Settings > App & Domains as well as installing on it, since a journey only stitches together across hosts you have listed.

If you run several properties, this is worth structuring at the start. A prospect who browses three of your properties before applying at one of them arrives as a single journey with one campaign attached, rather than three disconnected visits competing for credit. Retrofitting it later means the early journeys stay split.

Applications, Chat IQ and the Applicant Portal

RentCafe Chat IQ, Yardi's native AI leasing assistant, and the native Applicant Portal both happen inside the RentCafe ecosystem. Application submissions do collect a name and email address natively, so those arrive as named leads. We have not been able to fully confirm whether chat interactions expose the visitor's email address to page-level tracking specifically, so treat that one detail as worth confirming with your Yardi representative.

Some properties' leasing and application flows resolve to a Yardi-hosted RentCafe.com or SecureCafe URL rather than staying on your property's own domain, depending on your setup. If that is the case for your property, listing that application URL alongside your main site keeps that step connected to the rest of the visitor's journey.

Capturing leads before the application flow

If you want a dedicated on-site tool to capture email addresses and put a name to visitors before they ever reach your application flow, Bread & Butter offers its own suite of optional Conversion Tools: floating lead capture forms with one-click social login, and content gating for premium assets. They plug directly into your Bread & Butter account, with no separate app required. See our Conversion Tools overview for the full list.

This matters more on RentCafe than on most platforms, because the further into the Yardi flow a prospect gets before you have their email address, the less of their journey you control.

Pulling the data into your own reports

If you would rather hold the data yourself and use Bread & Butter as the capture layer, every field described above is available to send out. The Intelligence Brief carries the profile, the research and the attribution to your CRM. The Intelligence Stream carries the complete session history, page by page, to a webhook or to Zapier for a warehouse. Both are documented in Field Mapping Definitions, including the exact field names for first and last attribution.

Troubleshooting

If you cannot access the SEO Dashboard, you may need administrator permissions on your RentCafe account.

If data is not showing up, double-check that your App ID in the script matches your dashboard, and confirm your live URL is listed under Settings > App & Domains.

If UTMs are arriving empty on leads that came from paid campaigns, the parameters are being dropped before the first tracked page. Check the redirect chain as described above, and point the campaign at a page earlier in it.

If your property uses a hosting setup outside the standard RentCafe website builder, you may need a slightly different integration path; check with your Yardi representative.

Did this answer your question? Thanks for the feedback There was a problem submitting your feedback. Please try again later.