To make the most of this guide, you’ll need a baseline understanding of key concepts like events, charts, and properties. If you are still learning about Heap (meaning those terms don’t mean anything to you), we recommend taking our Hello Heap course or reviewing our Setting Up Heap guide prior to jumping into this guide.
Introduction
Understanding which marketing channels lead to the highest customer retention can help your business save money and increase ROI. In this guide, we’ll walk through a basic retention chart to see all of this and more.
Step 1: Define your retention metric
First things first: to measure retention, you must define what retention means to you – aka, what action are you looking for to indicate a customer is “Retained.” Is this a return session, another sale, or a particular action on the site or app like Heap’s “Run Query” button? Whatever this is, write it down.
Step 2: Confirm marketing content is being captured in Heap
Next, ensure you customize your marketing channel properties in Heap OR confirm that you have your UTM parameters are set up. You’ll need this for the next step.
Customizing your Marketing Channel Property
Out-of-the-box, Heap offers an Initial Marketing Channel property to help you get off to a great start. However, for your data to be the most robust, it’s best to create your own customized defined property based on what matters to you. Your Marketing Channel defined property will allow you to see ALL of your marketing efforts rolled up into this property.
Step 3: Analyze your features!
Now that you’ve set up your marketing property, let’s dig into analysis! You’ll want to set up a retention chart with the following criteria:
- Start Event: Session
- Return Event: Selected Retention Metric
- Group By: Marketing Channel
The results will tell you how each marketing channel ranks with retention. Read on for guidance on how to interpret this info.
Step 3: Interpret your results and take action
When looking at the results of this chart, if retention is a KPI and you don’t have an unlimited budget, this data can help inform you which marketing channels are your highest performers, and which are your lowest performers. This will allow you to confidently allocate marketing spend accordingly, and not waste dollars on channels that don’t lead to customer retention.
Conclusion
This simple yet powerful chart in Heap can quickly give you the insights you need to allocate marketing spend to the channels that actually lead to customer retention, and stop wasting money on marketing channels that don’t lead to customer retention.