Measure Purchases from Marketing or Social Media Campaigns

Need to know which marketing or ad campaign channel is driving the most purchases? FullStory can help.

If the links to your site from your marketing or ad campaigns include UTM parameters, FullStory will automatically pull in the UTM campaigns, sources, and mediums so you can understand how your campaigns perform across multiple channels—no special planning or preliminary tracking work required.

Here's what you'll use to get started:

• The name of your campaign, as set with UTM parameters on the published link that drives traffic from your campaign to your site
• The path of your confirmation page, the URL that your site visitors see after they've completed a purchase
• Omnisearch
• Top UTM Cards

Omnisearch and the Top UTM Cards are included "out-of-the-box" with all FullStory plans including Free, Business, Advanced and Enterprise.

Here's how to work through this use case:

1. First, identify the UTM parameters on your marketing or social media campaign link.
   
   Remember: you can always add UTM parameters to any link yourself before sharing that link, and you should write UTM parameters to help you understand how traffic is coming to your website from a specific campaign or channel.
   
   For example, if you wanted to know how many people are coming to the FruitShoppe from a Feb2020 email ad campaign on Instagram then you would add the following UTM parameters to the FruitShoppe URL:
   
   https://fruitshoppe.firebaseapp.com/?utm_campaign=Feb2020email&utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=email-ad
   
   Then, you would make sure that the link to the Fruit Shoppe from Instagram includes those extra parameters. That way, you would know that if someone visits that URL on your site with those extra parameters appended to the link that they were sent to your website directly from that campaign and from that specific source.
2. Next, using Omnisearch and just start typing "utm_campaign=" and the name of your campaign.
   
   
   Select the name of your campaign from the list. Right away, you can see how many people had sessions on your site from that campaign.
   
   
   And, if you scroll down, you can look at the Top UTM Sources and Top UTM Mediums results to see which channels and types of content or ads are performing best.
   
   
3. Then, to understand whether this traffic actually drove conversions, go back to your event filters and add the path of the confirmation page that your shoppers visit when they complete a purchase. Update the drop-downs to find people who performed these events in this order.
   

4. Adding the additional event of the confirmation event will filter the sessions in your Segment to only those visitors from the campaign who later converted.

   Note: You can optionally use the "within the same session" drop-down to refine results further to see only the people who converted within the same session.

Understanding why campaign traffic doesn't convert

Now that you've built a funnel to understand whether traffic from your campaigns leads to purchase confirmations, you can move the Visited URL (path) | is | (your confirmation page) event filter to be under the 'Exclude people who performed..." section to see a list of sessions where people visited your site from your campaign and didn't complete a purchase.

Then:

• Watch sessions within each segment - where do drop-offs seem to occur?
• Look for signals to understand the quality and intent of the campaign traffic - do the visitors seem to be engaging with your site and product pages? Do they seem to bounce right away? Does any of the traffic appear fraudulent?
• Check to make sure the user experience is optimized - did the page load quickly? Are there any errors or rendering problems?

Make note of anything that needs to be improved or that might inform tweaks to your campaign strategy. 

For example, if you notice that traffic from Instagram converts better than traffic from Facebook, you may need to refine your audiences on Facebook or change your spending there.

Take it a step further

You can apply this same workflow to understand conversions from any marketing channel where UTM parameters apply, including email campaigns or paid search. 

As long as you have UTM parameters on your set links, you can use FullStory to understand the customer experience for visitors coming from those links.