Using Kissmetrics to See Which Backlinks Are Driving Signups

November 20, 2015
Aaron Polmeer

By Zach Bulygo

Chances are your product or service is mentioned in various places throughout the web. Maybe a couple TechCrunch mentions, some press releases, guest posts, and all over social media.

With all these links pointing back to your site, certainly some of the people visiting are signing up or buying your product, right?

But if you’re not using an analytics tool like Kissmetrics, how would you ever know?

That’s what this post is about. Let’s get started.

See How People Move Through a Website Flow with the Funnel Report

The Kissmetrics Funnel Report allows marketers to see how visitors move through a particular website flow. Many marketers set up a funnel in various areas of their site:

  1. Signup Funnel
  2. Onboarding Funnel
  3. Checkout Funnel

The Funnel Report shows marketers what percentage of people move through each step. They can quickly identify roadblocks to conversion and work to improve their funnel performance. We talk about this more in a previous post.

Segment Traffic With Properties

Beyond just seeing how people move through a flow, marketers can also break down the funnel and see how segments (aka groups) of traffic move through the funnel. This can help identify top performing channels.

Now that we know what a Funnel Report does, let’s get into the use case.

Using the Funnel Report to See Which Links Drive Traffic and Customers

Meet Cindy, the Director of Marketing for a medium-sized B2B SaaS company.

Cindy and her marketing team know they have backlinks across the web. They’ve written guest posts, get good PR, and have their bases covered on social media.

To help her see what’s working and what’s not, Cindy uses the KIssmetrics Funnel Report. Here’s how her report looks:

In this report, Cindy is tracking three steps:

  1. The people that visit the site
  2. Out of those that visit, how many of them signup for a trial
  3. How many of the free trial users end up converting to being a paid customer?

We can see that she gets a good amount of traffic to her site, and a fair percentage of those people signup. This is a pretty healthy funnel, but there is always room for improvement.

To see which backlinks are driving signups and customers, Cindy segments her data. This is done in a few simple steps:

1. She’ll click this dropdown and select “Referrer”

2. After that she’ll click on the gear icon and get a few options:

She’ll select the formatting to URL:

3. She’ll also set it to “referrer” at the time of visited site:

Cindy clicks Apply and gets the list of backlinks that are driving traffic:

This doesn’t display the full Url in this view, but if you hover over each url you’ll see it.

While Cindy can look at all backlinks that send traffic to her site, she chooses to view the top 11 to get a quick glance.

Here are a few takeaways from this data:

  • The TechCrunch article has brought a lot of traffic, signups, and better-than-average conversion rate. She knows she should continue to get good coverage through TechCrunch.
  • An article on medium.com (again, Cindy can find out the exact web page just be clicking on the medium.com/… link) has brought traffic and signups, but no paying customers for this month.
  • The PR on Marketwired has delivered the best conversion rate. Given this, Cindy knows she should continue her PR efforts.
  • A few mentions and guest posts on other sites (the Kissmetrics Blog, Hitenism, Quick Sprout, etc) deliver quality traffic.
  • One link from Twitter (t.co) has brought Cindy 5 customers this month. To find the link, she can copy the full t.co link and paste it into Google to see the originating tweets. If this is coming from industry influencers, Cindy knows she should continue to reach out to these people.

Recap

Here’s what we went through:

  • What marketer wouldn’t love to know exactly which backlinks are driving not just traffic, but also customers? With Kissmetrics, they can.
  • They can get all this data with the Kissmetrics Funnel Report.
  • To view the data, just load the Kissmetrics Funnel Report, segment the traffic by Referrer, full URL, and select the referrer at the time of “Visited Site”.

Not using Kissmetrics yet? Request a personal demo to learn more about how we can help you optimize your marketing.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is a Content Writer for Kissmetrics.

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