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Using URL Referral Tracking To Ascribe Credit For Conversions
Using URL Referral Tracking To Ascribe Credit For Conversions

When driving traffic to convertible content, such as event signups or subscriptions, you can credit the users driving the conversions.

Michael Faliero avatar
Written by Michael Faliero
Updated over a week ago

Overview

Most content shared through Clearview Social is promotional or informational content: blog posts, industry news, announcements, etc. Sometimes, however, you'll be sharing content that actually drives a direct conversion: event signups, subscriptions to a newsletter, job referrals, or even direct sales. When you put links to such content into a Queue, adjust the content's URL to include URL Referral Tracking before sending the Queue, so that successes may be properly attributed to the user that drove the conversion.

Edit URLs in Queued Items to add Referral Tracking

When you’re in the Queue Builder, you can click on these three dots to edit and or copy the actual URL that lives behind a link as seen here.

Click this icon to bring up a window that allows you to edit the URL and add URL Referral Tracking. Everything you're going to want to do almost certainly comes after the ? in the URL. A full discussion of the details of how URLs work is beyond the scope of this article, but the briefest possible summary is that you're going to want to either:

  • If the URL already contains a ? and one or more parameter=value pairs, you'll want to tack &referralparameter=CLEARVIEW_FIELDNAME on to the end of those pairs. (The ampersand is important!)

  • If the URL contains no ? and no parameter=value pairs, you're going to add ?referralparameter=CLEARVIEW_FIELDNAME on to the end of the URL. (No ampersand, and the question mark is important!)

The URL Referral Fields are

  • CLEARVIEW_FNAME

  • CLEARVIEW_LNAME

  • CLEARVIEW_USER_EMAIL

These three phrases, when included in the URL of a Queued Article, will be substituted with the individual details of each user receiving the queue. You can then listen for these on your site to credit conversions or signups to individual users.

Testing It

The easiest way to test that you have used a URL Referral Field correctly is to Test Send the Queue to yourself, and then in the Queue Email you receive, click the Title of the Article to go visit the URL yourself (not the Share button). When you arrive at the Article in your browser, visibly inspect the URL—it should have substituted with your own first name, last name, or email accordingly. If you see your own data in the URL, you'll know it's working correctly; if you still see CLEARVIEW_FIELDNAME, you did something wrong, and ought to start a Support Chat to have us come take a look.

Capturing the Results on Your End

Capturing and listening to the field is your conversion software's responsibility. It will be up to your IT department or whoever administers and configures the particular system you are trying to attribute conversions inside. If you're passing over the field as, for example, user_source=CLEARVIEW_LNAME, then your IT department or software administrators are going to need to adjust the conversion page so that it listens for a field called user_source and expects it to contain the last name of an employee. Clearview Social Support is willing to assist with this and be an asset in explaining to people how to accomplish this, though at the end of the day it is not within our power to implement the solution for you—this part is inside your systems.

Example Walkthrough

Let’s walk through an example together. Let’s say, hypothetically, I wanted my team to share links to my company’s own lead capture form… https://clearviewsocial.com/contact/. Now, it’s important to understand that if somebody just tweets a link—”Hey, everybody, sign up for our company newsletter! clearviewsocial.com/contact”—then our web server, when traffic arrives at it, is going to have no idea who referred the traffic. All it can see is that a web browser showed up at it, asking for clearviewsocial.com/contact.

Instead, I’m going to write code on my signup form that listens for a field called referralsource and, if present, will note referralsource in the Contact record it creates when the form completes. 

So, I’ll edit my Clearview Social Queued Article to substitute in the user’s information for referralsource, like so:

Now, when I send this queue to my whole team, the link Adrian Dayton shares will point to clearviewsocial.com/contact?referralsource=Adrian-Dayton and the link that Lindsey Ziccardi will share will be clearviewsocial.com/contact?referralsource=Lindsey-Ziccardi and so on. When our own blog server is processing the submission of the form, we’ll instruct it to save the value of referralsource just like it does the other form fields (name, company size, etc).

UTM Campaigns

One of the tougher ideas to grasp with referral tracking is a question of "how will I track the information that Clearview sends with referral fields?". Unless you have a developer that can add this kind of tracking to your site manually, you may be left without an easy option. Thankfully, Google Analytics has built UTM Campaigns as a way to include custom tracking data to a URL that will be tracked by your Google Analytics account. This can be used to create segments and hone in on your target audience.

Important: You need an existing Google Analytics account to use UTM Campaigns. Learn more about how to add Google Analytics to your site.

Edit URLs in Queued Items to add UTM Tracking

When you are adding a Queue Item, use the same link editor to access UTM Campaigns:

You can also add the following field to your link to automatically track the social network source:

  • CLEARVIEW_SHARE_SERVICE

Note that you still must be very careful when editing URLs, and always remember to test any URL you edit before sending out your Queue!

Any Further Questions?

If there is anything else we can assist you with, you can contact Clearview Social Support either by emailing support@clearviewsocial.com or through the Intercom chat button in the bottom right of the site.

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