Custom sources
Measure every source's performance separately, gain a better insight of exactly what's going on, and optimize each source effectively.
When analyzing our traffic and where it comes from, we are used to letting the tools decide who comes from where, how many traffic sources we have, and which are their names.
If someone lands on our page coming from Facebook, we’ll only see them as one more visit from Facebook, regardless of how he found us: for all we can see (at first glance, at least), the user might have clicked on a paid ad, organically found our page, or got to us through an influencer or friend sharing a link.
If we really want to know which exactly it was, we have to filter visits according to UTMs. However, there are a couple downsides to this approach:
- We don’t normally know all our UTMs. We have to go to Facebook, look at the campaigns and check for UTMs. And what if we misspelled it in a couple of ads? Our filter wouldn’t include those results, and unless we checked super carefully every link in every ad, we wouldn't even realize.
- Filtering is tedious when comparing sources. So you've gone trough you ads' links on Facebook and know exactly which UTM you want to look at, and filter the metrics by it. And yes, now you can see exactly the metrics that you want. But once you’ve filtered the results, you've lost sight on the general performance of the page, and of every other source. Influences Jenny brought you 300 visits, but how does that compare to the rest of the sources? How many visits did influences John bring? Was it 150? How about any other type of campaign? You would have to remember all the numbers from all the sources to actually have a good perspective on how the filtered info is doing.
That’s exactly why we built a tool that lets you choose how to divide your sources, so you can see every single feature of Sensai based on such classification.
How does it work?
We read all the UTMs from your traffic sources, and pre-classify them the way any other tool does. However, once we’ve done this classification, there are a couple things that could go wrong: maybe you put in your UTMs ‘mailing facebook’ because it was a mailing campaign created from a Facebook form… Or maybe, it was the Facebook campaign that contained the mailing form. Other than that, you may want to divide each influencer on their own, or maybe you want to group a few together.
So, after our first classification is done, we show you how we’ve divided everything. You decide if you want to move a couple of campaigns, and where to put them. You can create new traffic sources (like ‘influencer Jenny’) and see that source in every metric and every graph in Sensai. Or you can group together things we’ve left apart (like ‘bing’ and ‘yahoo search’), and see them as one source through the entire software.
How do I do it?
You'll see a board of columns with cards in them. Every column represents a source, and the cards in the column are the UTMs we are attributing to that particular source. Also, on top of each column, there is a dropdown menu: this stands for that source’s channel.
You can move cards from one source to another, create new sources and even change the channel each source is associated to. To make it easier, you can see your source UTMs for a more general perspective, or see the Medium UTMs, for a more granular sight and classification.
Seeing all your UTMs this way, it's much easier for you to spot if one UTM was misspelled, and which traffic sources are being misclassified.
How should I divide my sources?
Yes everything sounds great, but how should I divide my sources? Which classification would be more insightful? Which sources should I group together?Which others should I break apart? It depends much on your business and the type of campaigns you're doing with each source, but here are some basic examples to get you started:
Influencers: Influencer marketing is a big part on how stores these days acquire new visitors and customers. Their drive on leads is ever-increasing, so each day more and more shops turn to influencers to promote their products. But as any marketing channel, it needs close watch and a lot of optimization. There are influencers who will work great for you, and one post will be enough for an impressive increase in sales; but there will be others who won’t bring you even one product sale, and who will only end up costing you money.
With traditional tools, it’s very complicated to measure their success, because even if each influencer has their own UTM, the tool will place all those visits/conversions in referral, and there’s nothing you can do about it: you can’t set ‘Influencer Jane’ as a traffic source, and you can’t compare Jane’s traffic to that from Facebook ads, nor analyze it like you would any other marketing channel.
If you are doing influencer marketing, we suggest to create an ‘Influencers’ source, moving all your influencers’ UTMs to that source. This way, you’ll be able to:
- Measure the general metrics and compare their performance to other sources
- See the journeys visitors take after coming from an influencer source. Do they come back doing an organic search? Or do they need another kind of advertising before being convinced to buy? This way, you can know the true cost of an influences-related purchase: if visitors need to come back lots of times, all through paid advertising, maybe influencers don’t work that good for you, or maybe you should consider another kind of content for them
- Measure the assisted conversions they drive
- Know which products/product categories work best with influencers, so for the following campaigns with them you can have a better-chosen product selection.
Also, if you have one big influencer and many small ones, we also recommend to separate him/her from the others. The idea is always for you to get an accurate perspective of what's going on, and if influences John brings you lots of visits and conversions, the overall results will be driven up by him, and maybe hide the poor results of the small influencers... Or vice versa: it's also quite probable that the small influencers are doing good, and as you pay them much less, the overall results are positive; however, even if big influencer John is bringing you lots of visits, that doesn't mean his audience is your audience, and people won't necessarily end up buying.
You should always know who is driving up sales individually, and avoid the blinding effects some sources will have over others when grouped together.
Facebook paid: As we briefly mentioned before, there are many different reasons why someone could come to your page from Facebook. Broadly, we can divide all the visits into two completely different channels (which traditional tools squeeze up together):
- Organic: Visitors who come to your site from organic posts from your Facebook page, or from a link a friend shared, or even an influencer shared.
- Paid campaigns: Visitors who come from paid campaigns you specifically created on the Facebook ads platform, and for which you are paying money, creating ads, selecting audiences, optimizing budgets, etc.
We encourage you to create one source for your paid campaigns and to move your paid campaigns’ UTMs to that source, and let the rest of the traffic in a Facebook organic source. This way you’ll be able to distinguish Facebook’s performance as a purely paid traffic source, and not bring in the noise from people who found your page by themselves, for whom you are not paying money, and who were most likely either already customers, or were already looking for something you had to offer.
Google Ads: Google is one of the paid sources with the most varied types of ads, which can also target people in very different stages of a purchase. When someone is actively looking for your product, brand, or competitors’ brand, people are decisively closer to a buying point, than when they are just browsing youtube looking for funny videos. Even Search and Shopping campaigns vary a lot, and seeing all of them in the same ‘Google Paid’ category is very misleading: you don’t get to realize if shopping campaigns work for your or not, or if the display ads are better. Seeing everything packed up together flattens out the curves, and keeps you from realizing if you should spend a little bit more in retargeting ads and cut down spend on video ads. We recommend a separation between Search, Shopping, Display and Video ads.
Mailing: Usually, you’ll have 2 types of mailing campaigns: the automated ones, where you program a trigger, and when users take a specific action, a very specific email is sent to them. The other type are ‘general’ or ‘newsletter’ campaigns, where you send the same campaign to an entire mailing list, without needing them to take a specific action. These are 2 extremely different kinds of campaigns, that reach users at very different stages, and that should be measured separately. We recommend to divide them in two different sources, so you can understand exactly how visitors from each type of campaign are behaving, and even reduce unsubscription rate by optimizing the time and number of campaigns sent. If you see all campaigns together, and have a spike in visits, you have no visibility whatsoever on which type of campaign is driving up those visits. The same goes for bounce rate. Say the automated campaigns have a huge BR, and the newsletter ones a small BR. If you see them together, you'll probably see a normal BR and move on. However, if you see them separately, you'll realize the automated campaigns have a huge BR. So you can go check your triggers and content and adjust them. This would not only help your BR and unsubrscription rate (we all know if you're bouncing too many emails from a sender, you'll end up unsubscribing)... But also your senders' reputation. This is crucial, because all mailing tools keep a track on your rep. If you go below a certain level, you'll be marked as spam, and service providers like Mailchimp, SendGrid and Sendinblue will stop delivering your emails, and most likely block your account.