A Better Way to Start Tracking User Acquisition

Here, we’ll look into why it is important to identify your traffic sources and how you can start tracking user acquisition with CAVE Analytics.

Importance of Identifying Traffic Sources on Your Website

Since brands nowadays use multiple channels for promotion and advertising, identifying the touchpoints and traffic sources of a lead or customer seems to become more and more difficult. And yet, this channel multiplication is what makes the source of purchase more important.

Once you identify the traffic origin and how each source is performing you are able to increase your efforts on the best performers, both in terms of human resources and monetary investments, to attract more leads or customers in these marketing channels.

The default referrer types are defined by:

Search engine
Direct traffic
Websites and
Campaigns

But consider that within the “Campaigns” type, each of the following referrers is a possible traffic source for your website and can be tracked with your URL builder:

Google AdWords
Facebook Ads
Display Ads, Banners
Links in Newsletters, Emailing
Affiliate links
Tweets

Measure your performance and conversions

With so many options, wouldn’t you like to know which one of them worked best?

To rate channels based on their performance, you first need to establish conversion goals and attribution

A conversion can be anything from sign-ups or downloads to leads, registered users and even paying customers. Define conversions based on what you want people to do once they’ve landed on your website.

Conversion Goals

You need to define each conversion type in the CAVE dashboard so that the analytics platform knows what to track. As far as attribution goes, CAVE Analytics by default links the conversion and attributes to the last seen (non-direct) referrer.

Track Your User Acquisition The Right Way

Campaign URL Builder

Using the Campaign URL Builder, you can tag each URL you promote in your campaigns using relevant keywords. Provided that your URLs are tagged, whenever someone clicks on them, the campaign will be listed as the referrer in the CAVE Analytics dashboard. Once you’ve generated trackable URLs, you can include them in your social media posts which could be planned and scheduled using a social media management tool.

Campaign URLs work wonders for telling which campaign helped you reach your goals faster, more efficiently, and so on but they do have a downside. They only work for URLs that you’ve shared.
If someone decides to share a link of yours on social media they won’t be tagged beforehand. This is where the Referrers section of CAVE Analytics comes in handy, as it acts as a backup for tracking traffic sources. The overview tab features a graph that can help you identify when spikes occurred.

How Does the Referrers Manager work?

Switching from Overview to Websites & Social, you can see a graphical representation of the social networks acting as referrers. The visualization can be changed to bar graphs or tables and can be easily exported in various formats for reports.

The Referrers Manager for CAVE Analytics provides access to the list of search engines and social networks that this analytics platform can handle by default. This simple feature can come in handy when sorting out referrers.

First of all, it displays a list of all search engines and social networks that CAVE Analytics can handle by default. Secondly, it enables Operators to disable/enable the platform’s default social network list.

Referrer Websites and Social

The websites list features not only the social referrers but all of the websites generating visits to your website. With CAVE Analytics you should not have issues with referrer spam, as the core team has tackled this problem early on.

Assuming that you’re relying only on Facebook and Instagram for your campaigns, you might want to give paid advertising a try on these two social networks. Paid ads can increase reach and engagement, can get more relevant visitors to your website and can have a snowball effect in a short period of time.

What Social Networks Can CAVE Analytics Track?

CAVE Analytics’ built-in social network list is quite extensive, as it currently features 70 platforms. The entries range from popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to more obscure ones such as Renren.

Conclusions

Remember to correlate the referrers with goals in order to determine which website or social network performs best in your context. And don’t forget to assign a monetary revenue value to each goal, in order to determine your social media ROI with greater accuracy.

Attribution: Florian Hiess