Data is key to keeping track of your referral success.
By measuring the volume of customers who interact with your referral channel and their progress through the funnel, we can work out where to focus your efforts to optimise performance.
Read on to learn more about each of these core metrics.
Orders
The foundation of your business. This metric can highlight important trends, such as the impact of promotional events, seasonality, and year-on-year growth.
We define orders as having a customer (email), value and currency, and a unique order ID.
Unique impressions
Every time a Mention Me referrer tag is called and we show a referral offer, dashboard, or landing page to one person. Unique impressions only account for one day (i.e. a 24 hour period), so running a report over a week won't deliver the results you'd expect.
Enrolled referrers
A unique customer who can share your referral offer, such as those who see your order confirmation page overlay. We use this metric as the denominator for calculating your share rate.
There are two different types of enrolled referrers:
- Customers who are automatically enrolled through the tag
- Customers who manually enter their details on the referrer registration page.
This metric doesn’t include people who have only clicked through the offer page.
We count enrolments into specific offers individually. So if a referrer enrols into two offers in one day (e.g. a standard and a VIP offer), it will count as two enrolments.
On the other hand, we’ll only count one enrolment if a referrer sees the same offer more than once. As a result, if you have a very long-running offer, the weekly number of enrolled referrers will likely drop over time. This in turn will increase the share rate.
Sharers/sharing customers
The number of unique referrers who've shared the referral offer in a set time period. For example, this could be when an email or social media link has been clicked, or a referee has entered a referrer’s name at checkout.
This metric can undercount the volume of sharing activity, as we only count shares we’re confident of. Furthermore, offline referral conversations can only be tracked when they convert into a purchase (that's why the purchase rate for Name Share® tends to be high).
This metric considers unique sharers within the period you're looking at. So if a referrer shares once on Monday and again on Wednesday, then you'll have a sharer count of 1 for Monday, 1 for Wednesday, and 0 for every other day in the week. But if you ask for a sharer count across the whole week, it will only be 1 (i.e. don't just add them up!).
Shares
Any given customer can send one or more shares. They might, for example, send an email, post on Facebook, send a Whatsapp message and share in person via Name Share®. Each method would count as a share, so that customer will have sent four shares.
Like sharers, this metric tends to be a conservative count of the reach of the referral programme. We can't detect if an email was sent to multiple people, or how many people saw a Facebook post.
Share responses
The first step in the referee journey: responding to shares.
Referees can respond by:
- Clicking the link in the share message, e.g. on a Facebook link or in an email
- Clicking the "Been referred by a friend" link and submitting a referrer’s name.
There's no deduplication, so if someone clicks the email link 100 times, we'll count 100 responses.
We aim to discount responses that aren't real people (such as bots crawling social networks and search engines).
Registered/incentivised referees
This measures how many referees enter their email addresses to register for the offer.
To reach this step, the email must be valid. Not everyone who registers will get an incentive. Some will be held in gaming queues, at other times we might have run out of vouchers we can give them. Incentivised referees are only those who have received their incentive (or a promise of a post-purchase reward).
Unless you experience a lot of gaming, you should have roughly the same number of Registered Referees as Incentivised Referees.
You can only register or be incentivised once.
Confirmed purchases/new sign-ups
The next metric in the funnel is confirmed purchases/new signups.
This measures the number of referees who have taken up your offer, gone to your website and placed an order. More specifically, it means that Mention Me has seen an order tag fire with details that correspond to an incentivised referee.
It’s likely that this is when your brand sends a thank you reward to the referrer. If your business doesn't take orders (e.g. you're a subscription business), this might instead correlate with the referee signing up for a new account.
(Qualified) new customers
This records the final step of the referee journey: the number of referees who become new customers as per your criteria (usually once they’ve ordered for the first time).
Revenue
We also track revenue figures associated with your referral programme, although this may not be relevant to all brands (i.e. subscription businesses).
There are three categories of revenue figures:
Revenue from New Customers - the amount spent by referees on their first orders
Revenue from New Customers' Subsequent Orders - how much referees go on and spend after their first order
Revenue from Rewarded Customers - money spent by rewarded referrers within 45 days of receiving their thank you voucher.
Some other things to be aware of when it comes to revenue:
- Revenue is the order value passed to Mention Me through the tags. It should be net of shipping, discount and taxes.
- Our default currency is GBP, but we can convert revenue figures using up-to-date exchange rates.
- Orders can be placed in any currency, but we'll only display revenue figures in a single reporting currency.
- The reporting currency can be set independently to other variables if desired.
Total Revenue
Is made up of three metrics:
- Revenue from referees on their first order
- Revenue from referees on their 2nd and subsequent orders
- Revenue from referrers within 45 days of receiving a reward as a result of a successful order.
