Rails - Tracking Referrals to Conversions

Question

We just launched and are looking to better understand where the users who are converting to registered users are actually coming from. We can see our traffic sources and referrals via Google Analytics and our other web statistics programs, but in volume, it's difficult to tie these specifically to which users in our database have converted and from where.

We have several "goals" in Google Analytics setup to better help track conversions, but what are others doing to associate user signups with inbound traffic sources?

One thought we've been kicking around - capturing the referral on the first page load and pass it along in the session into the registration form where you store it into the user record.

Any other solutions that are working successfully for you?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Indeed, I would suggest storing the referrer in the user record. Then you can write some code to sensibly draw out additional data from the URL. For instance, you could parse Google URL's to determine the keywords used to discover your site. And your code could detect things like referrals from ad runs, specific SEO campaigns you're running, or partner deals you have going.

It would be beneficial to spend some time building an admin-only page to visualize these conversions to help you better learn what is working and what isn't. And when things are going well, such a page is encouraging for the whole team!

Answer 2

Capturing referral is a good start. You should capture it to persistent cookie instead of a session so that if user returns tomorrow it still has the same referral information.

I've created a gem to automate tracking and saving referral infos. See https://github.com/holli/referer_tracking for more info.

Some notes when designing tracking (I've tried to catch these with the gem already)

• It might be better to save tracking data to separate table. So that when you delete user account you won't delete information about how that user account was created. You get the answer like "where does bogus user accounts come from?"
• Save also cookies to db. If you are using Google Analytics you can parse Googles cookies to get additional information about the visitor. Like the number of visits or campaign information.
• It's good to save also user_agents etc to be able to differ between mobile and desktop browsers etc.
• In the end its good to visualize the information and conversions. But in the beginning its hard to know what data you want to visualize and how. So try to capture as much data as possible and then later decide how to crunch that data with scripts.