Discovering the Origins of Your Customer Base

Source: Mediahawk

Referral channels, whether it's leads from a referral partner or directory, or engagement with your sponsored and placed content, often bring prospects who show signs of high intent and genuine interest in your business. This makes referral channels incredibly valuable tools for marketers. However, they are often underutilized and not fully optimized.

Tracking referral channels’ performance and accurately attributing sales and conversions to specific sources is crucial to ensure that your marketing budget is being invested in the right channels. If you are unable to do this, you may be missing out on important insights.

To unlock the full potential of your channels, it is important to understand why you might be missing parts of the picture when tracking leads from referrals. By addressing these issues, you can make more informed decisions and optimize your marketing strategies for better results.

What are you missing in your referral data?

Capturing details about leads from your referral channels can be difficult if you don’t have the right tools.

Referral channels pose a significant challenge because you do not have access to analytics on your leads, unlike channels you have control over, such as pay-per-click and email marketing. According to Faye Thomassen, Mediahawk’s head of marketing, this lack of data can be a major obstacle.

Without utilizing call tracking with static or dynamic numbers, you will not receive any information on the inbound calls from your referrals. Similarly, if UTM tags are not used on the links back to your website, you will not have any data on the web traffic generated from your referral channels.

Many marketers try to overcome the challenge mentioned by Thomassen by simply asking customers to specify where they found out about their business. This approach sometimes includes offering a discount in exchange for mentioning a particular phrase. However, depending on customers to accurately identify their source of information is often unreliable, as many will simply say, "I found you on the internet."

In situations where there is no clear source data available, sales teams may default to assuming that the main source of the lead is the phone call they received. The issue with this assumption is that without concrete source data, marketers are unable to confirm the actual source that prompted the phone call.

Without accurate tracking data, it's challenging to link conversions and sales to their original sources. This lack of attribution makes it harder to manage referral channels effectively.

The Dilemma of Investing Without Knowing What Works

When you don't have a clear view of how well your referral channels are doing, it's difficult to make comparisons. This makes it challenging to determine where you should allocate your marketing funds.

For instance, if your business is listed in various directories and each listing shares the same phone number, it becomes hard to identify which directory is generating the most leads. One directory could be bringing in numerous leads weekly, while another may not be driving any engagement.

If you don't know which channel is the most valuable, you may end up wasting your marketing budget on sources that aren't effective. This could also mean missing out on opportunities to generate more leads from the sources that are actually working.

To track web traffic, you can access referral information through Google Analytics 4. However, this process can be complicated as it requires custom reporting to view domain data. Without the correct configuration, it's possible to overlook this valuable information entirely.

Quick tip: Be cautious of self-referrals

Self-referrals can happen easily. If your analytics code is not set up correctly or if you have added a UTM tag to an internal link, your own website domain might mistakenly appear as the source of referral traffic.

To build a clearer picture of your referral channels, it is important to avoid distorting your acquisition data, artificially inflating your user sessions, and altering user behavior data. Here are some helpful tips to prevent this from happening.

To really understand the performance of your referral channels, there are a few essential steps you can take to generate the right insights.

1. Use UTM tags when you link back to your website

It is recommended to utilize UTM tags when linking to your website from an external source. When combined with a reliable marketing analytics platform, UTM tags provide valuable data on where your leads are coming from.

With the help of UTM tags, you can easily identify the sources of your leads. When you implement a reliable call-tracking solution, analyzing the effectiveness of your referral channels becomes simpler. A good call-tracking tool will enable you to correctly attribute revenue to the right sources and determine which referral platforms and partners are worth your investment.

2. Utilize Static Numbers in Referral Channels

By adding unique static numbers to your presence in referral channels, you can easily monitor the number of calls you receive from each specific source. These static numbers can be utilized in various places, such as directories, sponsored content, or printed advertisements.

Using the same phone number in all business listings makes it impossible to compare channels’ performance (source: Mediahawk)

By using dynamic numbers, you can gain more detailed insights about your leads. For example, one law firm saw a 75% increase in inbound enquiries by utilizing call tracking to identify the sources of their leads.

When visitors come to your website through referrals, you can gain valuable insights into their behavior using dynamic call tracking. Dynamic numbers are assigned to each visitor, and when paired with properly tagged URLs, you can access information such as:

• The specific website and page that led the visitor to your site

Their visitor journey through your site

The pages they viewed while on the phone

Whether they initiated a live chat or downloaded a piece of content

Their prior or subsequent visits to your site

After their call, you will also have access to any keywords captured from the lead's phone conversation and their previous purchase history, thanks to advanced speech analytics and sales matching.

4. Make comparisons between your referral channels

When you have a complete picture of your leads from referrals, it’s easier to start comparing performance across your referral channels.

Tools like Parameter Connect in Mediahawk can help you automate cross-channel reporting by combining data from your referral channels. This allows you to easily compare on-website and off-website sources in a single report. You can also set parameters to analyze sources at a more detailed level.

For instance, if you are in the automotive industry, using a parameter like 'automotive-print-ads' can help you compare the effectiveness of all your print ads. This way, you can identify which ads are bringing in the most valuable leads.

Conclusion

According to Thomassen, effectively managing your referral channels involves gaining a better understanding of the leads coming from each source. By analyzing the right data, you can identify which sources are generating actual engagements, which ones are underperforming, and where you should allocate your marketing budget more efficiently.

Check out Mediahawk's guide, "From complexity to clarity: The role of data in driving marketing success," where we delve into the importance of lead data in all aspects of your marketing efforts. Grab your copy now to discover helpful strategies for your own campaigns.

Editor's P/S:

This article highlights the importance of accurately tracking referral channels to optimize marketing strategies. By utilizing UTM tags and call tracking with static or dynamic numbers, businesses can gather valuable data on the sources of their leads. This data enables marketers to compare the performance of different referral channels and make informed decisions about where to allocate their marketing budget.

Furthermore, the article emphasizes the need to avoid self-referrals and provides tips to prevent this from occurring. By implementing these strategies, businesses can gain a clearer understanding of their referral channels and identify the sources that are generating the most valuable leads. This information empowers marketers to optimize their campaigns for better results and ultimately drive marketing success.