Want to understand how to analyse your data in the platform? You're in the right place!
Let's look at all the different metrics that Mention Me collects and how to measure the referral funnel's performance. We use data to track how successful referral is and to help you determine what you should do to improve everything.
By measuring the volume of customers who interact with the referral journey and seeing how they move through the referral funnel (or where they drop out) you can work out how to improve performance and where to focus your efforts.
Let's start with an overview of the stages of the referral journey (you can find this graph in the ‘Benchmark’ tab under ‘Performance’ in the platform:
After the referrer has made an order, Mention Me serves them an offer impression and enrols them into the referral programme. If they then choose to become a sharer, then they send shares to their friends (the referees).
Once the referee has received the share, they can respond by clicking on the share link. Next, they can register (by entering their email address) and get an incentive to proceed. They're then sent on to the client's site to make a purchase, racking up your revenue as they do so. In some cases, they must then do something else to become a qualified new customer.
Building the data set you want
If you head to the Mention Me platform, and into the Performance section, you can click on the "Explore" tab at the top and you can pick any and all pieces of data you want to look at, and split it in a way that makes sense:
Tick any of these metrics, press the Create Report button and you'll get new data and a new graph to go with it (when possible). For example, select impressions to start at the top of the conversion funnel, and understand the trends associated with the promotion of your referral programme when you select split by promotion points.
Splitting your data through different dimensions:
Promotion point, situation
The promotion point dimension (also very commonly referred to as situation) splits things down according to where the referrer first saw the referral offer.
As you know, every time you add a new promotion point, we ask you to add a situation parameter at the end of the URL linking to your landing page (if this is new to you, head here to make sure you’re tracking your referral in the best way). Mention Me records that situation and tracks it through the referral journey, so we can tie back all referral activity to the situation (aka promotion point) that started it.
So, if you split metrics by this dimension you are breaking down activity according to the promotion point you’ve used to enrol the referrer into the offer. If you’ve used meaningful situations then it becomes very easy to tell whether that email they sent last month has done much.
Some of the promotion points are actually standard Mention Me promotion points (e.g. dashboard-register) generated by bits of the Mention Me system working as intended. If you want to have more details on those, please head over to this article which covers the standard promotion point situations.
Share method
The share method is used to break down activity according to the share method used by a referrer, so you can see, e.g. how many referees responded to a post on Facebook, or how many people signed up having seen an email. We can only associate a referrer with a sharing method once they've shared
Segments
This is a very useful dimension if you’ve added a segment parameter in your referrer tag. To explain a bit better, every time you call a Mention Me tag, you can choose if you wish to specify a segment parameter. You can put anything you want in there (country code, loyalty tier, product bought, etc), but what Mention Me can do with it is:
- use it to target campaigns given appropriate triggering rules, e.g. show campaign 1 for everyone with a segment of VIP
- record it and make it available for analysis in the reporting platform.
Campaign / Experiment / Offer
Break the data down according to the Campaign and/or Experiment and/or Offer the referrer engaged with:
The names of the labels for each Campaign, Experiment and Offer in the graphs are drawn from the current names of each particular Campaign, Experiment and Offer.
Other splits:
Currency:
This is only usable against the following metrics
- Orders
- Revenue from new customers first orders
- Revenue from new customers subsequent orders
- Revenue from rewarded referrers
Mobile/Desktop:
You can split by what device customers (and potential customers) are using when related to their interactions with referrals. We only start tracking this at the "Customers Enrolled" Metric and can be useful for determining what to focus on (if 90% of customers are enrolling on desktop, but 10% of new customers are using Mobile to purchase, you can focus on optimising the desktop journey for referrers, and the mobile journey for referees).
