Referral Sources is Key to Measuring Success

For those of you who don’t know, I created this blog for my graduate class, Web Metrics and SEO. In my professional career, I have worked with several analytics platforms, ranging from Sysomos and CoreMetrics, to Radian 6 and other free tools. Google Analytics (GA) has been one of the strongest tools, however, in providing the right insights for measuring success and seeking out areas of improvement. Perhaps one of the biggest measurements GA provides is traffic sources. This area says a lot about how your site is doing and how its efforts are turning visitors into customers.

Why Traffic Sources Matters

A brand’s traffic source directly correlates with its health and position across a variety of channels. For starters, referral traffic (a traffic source from another site) and direct traffic (URLs typed or bookmarked which visitors use directly to your site) have are two indicators of how a specified campaign or how much organic reach a brand has.

As Kaushik puts it, “Direct traffic contains visitors that proactively seek you out, everyone else you have to ‘beg’ to show up on your site!” (Kaushik, 2010).  He makes a strong point in that people who directly visit your site are:

• People who are your existing customers or past customers and have bookmarked your site
• People who are familiar with your brand
• People driven by WOM (Word of Mouth)
• People driven by offline campaigns (TV ads, OOH ads, etc.) and typed the URL directly

In other words, we want direct traffic because these people make up some of the strongest brand influencers who were motivated to visit your site directly over other competitors.

But let’s not forget about referral traffic. This, too, is an important part analytics. Referral traffic is a measurement of how a brand’s efforts are being voiced across third party sites. Users will come across some form of content, click on it and visit a brand’s site.

According to B2C, Referral traffic accounts for almost 70% of all traffic for blogger Andrew Glasscock.  He goes onto say that each of your top referrers can potentially be tapped for better referrals and higher traffic counts. “If you receive a lot of traffic from Google, perhaps you should advertise with their services and boost those numbers.”

Where Search and Social Come Into Play

Search is still, and will probably always be, the number one reason why people interact with the Internet. Having the right mix of SEO techniques and paid advertising campaigns is important in creating a consistent flow of search traffic. None of this is possible without attaining high rankings on a mix of keywords. 

GA’s search traffic tool identifies what keywords people are using most to visit a brand’s website. This information can be helpful in identifying how best to increase reach on those keywords while identifying areas of opportunity on keywords a brand wants to be known for.

The goal of Google, and all search engines for that matter, has been to deliver the most helpful and relevant information to users. According to Martin Wong, “Google’s success came from taking an approach that was radical in those early days: to curate for content quality by measuring the number of links to a page” (Wong, 2012). In other words, the more inbound links a page received, the greater their authority. This leads to a page having stronger content. Social media, however, evolves that mindset by incorporating social media into the mix. Tweets, Facebook likes and +1 vote are factors of how a page will rank against its competitors. 

Considering this and the importance of social, GA has made social its own traffic source, tracking social interactions and which social media channels they are coming from. According to Google, “The social web connects people where they share, critique and interact with content and each other. Social analytics provides you with the tools to measure the impact of social.” In other words, there is a high probability that a brand that is socially active and engaging will generate greater amounts of traffic and rank higher, over its competitors.

Knowing which social channels your audience interacts with is key for producing socially-driven campaigns. For example, Pinterest has been growing in popularity accounting and is now among the top referral sites, beating out Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Linkedin (Crook, 2012).  

This drives brands to build a Pinterest campaign in order to drive traffic to their site.

Traffic Sources are Socially Impacts

Referral sources, simply put, are the culmination of all traffic visiting a brand’s site and knowing where they came from. This allows brands to identify and develop the right tactics that will lead to goals being met (lead acquisition, ecommerce transactions, etc.).

With social media having such a strong impact in how people search for information, Google has made great strides in taking into consideration the importance social media has. 

GA’s latest efforts to push Social into its own referral source is reason enough to pay attention to how social affects a brand’s reach. A brand’s social impact directly correlates with: (1) which pages and sources people engage with; (2) what information is being shared and leads to an ecommerce transaction, when applicable; (3) measuring what social engagements are occurring on your website (likes, shares, etc.); (4) and what kind of traffic patterns are directly related to social.

References:

Crook, J. (2012, March 8). Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/pinterest-now-generates-more-referral-traffic-than-twitter-study/

Glasscock. (2012, June 10). How to gauge your best referral traffic in google analytics. Retrieved from http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/how-to-gauge-your-best-referral-traffic-in-google-analytics-0189880

Kaushik. (2010, September 20). Excellent analytics tip 18 make love to your direct traffic. Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-web-analytics-tip-analyze-direct-traffic/

Wong, M. (2012, February 29). How social media drives search results. Retrieved from http://www.marketingsmartt.com/social_drives_search/

 

ROI: Where Web Analytics and Social Media Meet

Everyone is always asking about ROI (Return on Investment) – and rightfully so. Marketers and their bosses need to see hard data that reflects how their efforts are gaining or losing business. When it comes to social media, it’s even more prevalent to know how social media campaigns are turning a profit for a brand.

An article posted on gigaom.com about 3 accurate metrics for ROI on social media campaigns discusses three distinct ways of measuring ROI:

1. Social Media Revenue Conversion: “a measure of how many people become customers through social media referral channels.” In other words, web tracking allows for the measurement of referrals from various social media sites, either through traceable links or shared campaigns through third party apps (Wildfire App).
2. Facebook engagement: “measures a brand’s ability to communicate successfully with their customers on the social network.” Similar to Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and a few other third party solutions tracks fan page engagement, content quality and overall sentiment
3. Social customer support metrics: “measure the impact of customer support on brand health and the cost of staffing a social support program.” Along with the previous point, customer support is key to providing real time response to customer inquiries, which directly correlates with how successful a brand is in social media. The more positive the sentiment, the greater potential for growth. The more negative the sentiment, the greater potential for failure and a negative sentiment with a brand’s audience.

Google Analytics Now Measures Social Interactions

While there is no direct way to create a social media effort and it automatically track its profit, Google Analytics has done a great job in developing a tool for measuring Social.

 

Its latest update now has the ability to calculate the “social value”, primarily when goals are E-commerce based, through a myriad of metrics and calculations.  

 

Its new tools incorporate various tracking parameters to measure conversions from social actions (Likes, Tweets, Shares, Pins, referral source, etc.), which then provides a value to said social actions.

Calculating Social Value

ConvinceandConvert.com has a great article, which details the new tool and measuring social value. 

With pre-determined goals setup, a brand can see how conversions are valued from top funnel to bottom funnel of the sales pipe.

Google’s Social Report allows marketers to see the full social value generated from social channels. According to Google Analytics blog:

“Social Value visualization compares the number and monetary value of all your goal completions against those that resulted from social referrals - both as last interaction, and assisted.

A visit from a social referral may result in conversion immediately or it may assist in a conversion that occurs later on. Referrals that lead to conversions immediately are labeled as Last Interaction Social Conversion. If a referral from a social source doesn’t immediately generate a conversion, but the visitor returns later and converts, the referral is included as an Assisted Social Conversion.”

 

The biggest takeaway from web metrics and social media is how a brand implements the various tools to measure its successes and areas of improvement. 

What we want to avoid is developing RAMs (Random Acts of Marketing), which can be costly mistakes. Worse off, they are immeasurable and can prove to be a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

Any smart marketer’s first step is to research and identify the proper tools that can measure the various points of a marketing campaign. Then, take things off from there.