Understanding Your Referral Metrics and Definitions

This guide walks through the metrics recorded across the referral funnel to help you analyse performance, make informed decisions, and identify opportunities for enhancement.

To improve referral performance, it's essential to understand each stage of the referral journey. Whether you're measuring engagement from referrers or tracking how referees convert into new customers, data provides the insights needed to optimise your referral programme.

Referral Funnel Overview

The end-to-end journey consists of two main participants:

• Referrers: Your brand advocates – existing customers who share your referral offer.
• Referees: Their friends – those who receive referral offers and are encouraged to become new customers.

The funnel focuses on tracking volume, performance, and conversions at each step. Key measures fall into three categories:

1. Volume metrics: e.g., impressions, shares, orders.
2. Conversion metrics: e.g., share rate, purchases per sharer.
3. Revenue metrics: e.g., first order revenue, lifetime value.

Core Metrics Definitions

Orders

• 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.

Impressions & Exposure

• Impressions / Shown: The number of times a referral offer is displayed by Mention Me. This only includes pages served by Mention Me, not external email marketing or banners.
• Unique Impressions: The number of unique customers who saw a referral offer within a 24-hour period.
• Seen: The number of unique customers eligible and registered to share referral offers, either actively or passively.

Customer Enrollment

• Enrolled: Customers enrolled in your referral scheme either through automatic enrollment (e.g., post-purchase overlay) or manual sign-up. Counts repeat enrolments for distinct offers as separate enrollments.
• Actively enrolled: Customers who click on a referral offer at post purchase or register directly via a landing page. All of these customers will receive a Referral Registration email.

Sharing Activity

• Sharers / Sharing Customers: Unique referrers who shared the offer during a given time period. This can include email, social links, or entering their name during checkout.
• Shares: The number of shares made, across any channel (email, WhatsApp, Facebook, Name Share®, etc.). A single customer can send multiple shares.
  
  We take a conservative approach to counting shares. We don't count a share if the referrer presses the e.g. share via email button in the share options, because the referrer might not complete the sharing action. Instead we only count it when we're confident that the share has been sent. How we get that confidence varies by channel.
  • for email sharing we wait until we see someone click on the link in the email before we count the share
  • for social media sharing we wait until we see the social network itself follow the link (as evidence it has been posted)
  • with name sharing we can only count a share when the referee uses the referrer's name during the checkout process.
• Shares per Sharer: Average number of times each customer shares. Higher figures suggest customers are sharing across multiple platforms or to multiple friends.

Referee Response

• Share Responses: The number of actions taken on a shared offer (e.g., link clicks or entering a friend’s name at checkout). Includes all clicks — no deduplication (i.e., multiple clicks by the same person are all counted).
• Responses per Share: Measures engagement by dividing share responses by total shares.

Referee Registration & Incentives

• Registered / Incented Friends: Number of referees who enter their email and receive an incentive or promise of a reward. Metrics may exclude duplicates and only count verified or legitimate incentives. High gaming or bot traffic may reduce this ratio.
• Incented per Response: How likely it is that referees who click a referral link actually register for the offer and claim their incentive. A target of 50%+ is considered healthy.

Conversions & Outcomes

• Confirmed Purchases: Referees who place an order after engaging with the referral offer. Includes only transactions tracked via Mention Me order tags.
• New / Qualified Customers: Referees who make their first purchase and meet your qualification criteria for rewards (e.g., product category rules or subscription completion).
• Purchases per Incented: Conversion rate from incentivised referees to actual customers.
• New Customers: Distinct referees who complete their first order, matched by email.
• Unique Successful Referrers: Referrers who successfully introduced at least one friend who became a new customer.
• Rewarded Referrers: Referrers who received a reward because a referee completed the necessary action.

Revenue Metrics

• Total Revenue: Tracked revenue figures associated with referred purchases. This typically includes:
  • Revenue from New Customers: First orders from referees.
  • Revenue from Repeat Referee Orders: Orders made by referees beyond their first.
  • Revenue from Rewarded Customers: Purchases made by referrers after receiving a reward (within 45 days, typically).
• Reporting Currency: Mention Me processes all financial metrics in one reporting currency (usually GBP by default), even if campaigns span multiple currencies. The reporting currency is configured at the account level and cannot be dynamically changed by campaign.

Conversion Ratios to Monitor

To assess referral effectiveness, these key ratios are tracked:

• Overall Customer Share Rate: Sharing customers ÷ unique customers. Strong programs reach 30%.
• Purchase Rate (Purchases per Sharer): New customers ÷ sharers. Mature programs average 15–20%.

FAQs

Why is there no “Order” data per campaign?

Because the campaign is determined after the order occurs. The funnel order is:

Order → Offer Impression (Campaign Assigned) → Enrolled → Shared

Thus, we associate campaigns at the impression stage, not the order stage, making it impossible to report orders directly by campaign.

What currency is reporting displayed in?

Reporting supports a single currency per account. Revenue data across all orders will be converted to your configured reporting currency using real-time exchange rates. It is not possible to show multiple currencies per report.

If you have further questions, visit the Help Centre or get in touch with the Mention Me support team.