Referral links?

[CarolineS]

Hi all!

I’m looking to track referrals to our community from our sales team (individual sales team members). Has anyone found a good solution for custom per-person referral links? I know there are 3rd party platforms that do such things; has anyone had luck with these integrated with a community? Or found a way to do it within lithium? I was also contemplating perhaps using utm codes and google analytics as a quick-n-dirty solution; thoughts on that?

Thanks!

[DanK]

My company uses Adobe Analytics (Omniture) across all web properties so we utilise that for these kinds of purposes by adding variables to links. In a previous project we wanted to track Social > Community transactions so we gave our agents links that included an agent specific value (to split reporting down to agent level) and a project value (making it easy to filter reports).

An alternative is to just give each agent a unique short link and monitor the click throughs (understanding that link shortening tools are often overcounting clicks as analytics platforms actively attempt to filter out bots and other **bleep**ty traffic).

[CarolineS]

Gold as always, @DanK! Thank you!!

[Parshant]

@CarolineS

It's pretty easy to use Google and Adobe Analytics to examine referral traffic, including using custom referral tracking codes.

Here's how:

Once you have referrers or affiliates that plan to link to your site, you can ask that those affiliates append a unique tracking ID to the end of the URL. For example, I'll use the following referral ID's to track metrics from user1 and user2 websites to Example communty or site.

• http://www.example.com/?ref=user1
• http://www.example.com/?ref=user2

After you've seen some traffic build up from those affiliates, you must create two Custom Advanced Segments in Google Analytics.

You can also examine conversion driven from the affiliate.

[CarolineS]

Thank you, @Parshant! I wasn't aware of the option to use "ref=" as opposed to UTM codes. Is there a benefit to using ref over utm?