We all know that acquiring new users can be especially difficult… and costly! Marketing budgets will vary, but most companies spend anywhere between 20-50 percent of their annual recurring revenue (ARR) on acquiring new customers. With that in mind, it’s important to make sure that you are optimizing that ad spend. This play will help you to get a broad overview of where you are acquiring your traffic and which of those locations is converting at the greatest rate.
Step1: Create the inputs needed for this play:
| Name | Description | Tips for Setting Up |
| Initial Marketing Channel | A defined property that groups together similar initial marketing channels (e.g. Email, Display Ads) for a user | Heap has a predefined template to help you set up defaults for this property (see screenshot below). If your definition of channels vary from ours, you can customize the definition and create your own definitions for “marketing channels” |
| View Any Marketing Page | An event that captures all page views that happen on your marketing site | There are a variety of ways to create this event. If you only have Heap installed on your marketing site, then you may simply use the default Pageview event. However, if Heap is installed on your app and your marketing site you will want to differentiate these actions. Typically, you can use the Paths (or URLs) on your site to distinguish between these as shown below. |
| Conversion Event | An event that tracks completion of a goal event (purchase, sign up, etc.) | What is the primary action that you want your users to take? Do you want them to start a free trial, contact sales, attend a demo webinar? This will be important for understanding which channels are having the most success (not just driving the highest volume). |
Step 2: Create your Dashboard in Heap
Click here to create this Dashboard in Heap.
Report Breakdown
Report 1: Acquisition Rate
What does it tell you?
This report looks at your acquisition rate. Specifically, it’s telling you how many new users visited your marketing site within each week over the past 90 days.
How to interpret?
Ideally, you see an upward trend here as you improve your acquisition strategies. If you see a sharp dip or spike in a given week try to dig in to understand what might have caused the change. Was there a well received piece of content that drove more visitors, was there a new feature released, was there a seasonal event that might have naturally caused a change in your traffic, were you holding a conference that week, did you get mentioned in the press? Understanding what caused the change means that you can try to replicate the positive and avoid those actions that caused negative results.
Report 2: New User Conversion Rate
What does it tell you?
This report will show you how many of your new users in the last 30 days completed your primary conversion event.
How to interpret?
If this number is low, don’t panic! For SaaS companies a conversion rate between 5-10% is considered good, and eCommerce sites only see a 2% conversion rate on average. The key here is seeing improvement overtime and this report will tell you both where you are starting from and where to focus attention.
Add a Date Range Comparison to see how this report changed compared to a previous period
Report 3: New Users by Initial Marketing Channel
What does it tell you?
We already have a report that’s looking at your overall acquisition rate but this report will start to tell you which of your marketing channels is driving the majority of your traffic.
How to interpret?
Are there certain channels that are performing above the rest? Do you notice a difference between paid channels and organic channels? Is there any clear winner between email, search or social channels? Was there a spike in any of these? Before you jump to investing in the channels that are driving the most traffic you’ll also want to compare this to the next report (Top Converting Initial Marketing Channels) to ensure that the high traffic is translating into higher conversions as well.
Report 4: Top Converting Initial Marketing Channels
What does it tell you?
The previous report showed you which channels were driving the most traffic but it’s equally important to understand which channels are converting at the greatest rate.
How to interpret?
What’s surprising here? Are your highest traffic drivers also your best converting channels? If so, great, you’re probably investing in the right places. But if you see a channel(s) that’s outperforming others you may want to dig in. Could Organic Social be so successful b/c influencers/customers are sharing your product or is this just where most of your target demographic hangs out? Do you see a spike in your email conversions one week…what new campaign did you lunch or what new audience did you reach out to? Find the outliers here and then build a strategy to try and capture and replicate your success.
Report 5: New Users by Initial UTM Source
What does it tell you?
We’ve taken a look at the channels but this is a chance to go deeper on that analysis. It’s great that paid search traffic was up but did you see more results from Google or Bing? (Don’t laugh, we’ve seen it happen!)
We chose to Initial UTM Source but you could swap this for any of the UTM parameters you’d like
How to interpret?
Just like before, you want to understand where you’re seeing the best and the worst results then dig in to learn more.
Report 6: New vs Returning Users
What does it tell you?
Many of the reports we’ve looked at so far have just looked at your overall traffic. But this report will help you to understand how much of that traffic is new users (visiting for the 1st time in the past 30 days) vs users who continue to come back to your site.
How to interpret?
If you are like most sites you are going to have way more new users than returning users. But many studies have shown that returning users have higher engagement rates with your site and more importantly, they also tend to have higher conversion rates and higher sales. For eCommerce sites it’s not uncommon to have 95% of your traffic be from new users (we discussed earlier that conversion of only 2% is good but for SaaS where the sales cycle is longer you may get a higher percentage of returning users who continue to research you throughout the sales cycle. If you also have strong blog content you may get more returning visitors who are there to consume your content. Having a low number of returning users may be standard or expected for you, and therefore normal but for others, it could mean that your content (or product) is not resonating with your audience.
Report 7: New vs Returning Users by Week
What does it tell you?
Instead of looking at overall new vs returning users in a given time frame, this helps you look at your trends overtime.
How to interpret?
As you make changes to your site and/or release new content pay attention to the changes these can tell you how successful your content is at keeping users engaged.
Report 8: Top Converting Landing Pages
What does it tell you?
Different landing pages for different advertisements, ads or email campaigns are great. They let you personalize your messaging or give your users a simplified CTA. This report doesn’t just look at the traffic being driven to those pages but more importantly it will tell you which is having the greatest impact on your Conversion event.
How to interpret?
We all know that first impressions matter. If you don’t capture your prospects attention when they land on the site you’re likely to lose them forever. So understanding which content is performing at a high level can help you refine your marketing strategy. Use this report to inform your future experiments. Does a certain Solution specific page get more signups? Does a particular product page get more purchases compared to bringing users to the homepage? Was there a particular webinar signup that led to people starting a trial? Having this information will help you make strategic decisions going forward about where to drop your new users.
Report 9: New Users by Initial Landing Page
What does it tell you?
This report is going to tell you which of your landing pages are getting the most traffic.
How to interpret?
As we mentioned earlier, it is important to know where your traffic is coming from and in this case where they are landing. But as we mentioned earlier, it’s not enough to just drive traffic to a particular landing page, you’ll want to compare this to the previous report to understand what’s working and what’s not.
Taking Action
Refining your acquisition strategy is a never ending process and there’s no silver bullet that we can give you here. However, this dashboard should give you an idea of where you might want to invest your time over the next month or next quarter. Where do you think you can find the most leverage? Experiment with changing your spend between different channels, augmenting your content strategy and learning from the insights here. Then, keep measuring! This is an iterative process. Get the data, look for insights, take action, then go back to the data to measure the results of your work!
In Conclusion
It’s getting harder and harder to acquire new customers so it’s important that you use all of the tools you can to make sure that you acquire more than your competitors. Using data to inform your acquisition strategy is the 1st step to ensuring that you grow your business.