URL Translation, Advisor Attribution and Dynamic URLs

Yext (formerly Hearsay) URL Attribution enables your company to dynamically customize the URLs of shared social content. By leveraging this feature, your business can improve the measure of ROI on its social program and direct user traffic from shared posts in a more meaningful way.

The Suggested Content ID Urchin Tracking Module tag, or UTM for short, enables you to track which content from your organization’s suggested content library is receiving the most clicks and engagements on social media, as well as track which network the content was viewed on and which user and workspace within your organization published it.

This is achieved by configuring a set of rules that modify URLs based on specific domains identified by an organization. Once Yext receives the destination domain addresses, it appends UTM tags and creates rules based on the referral sources an organization would like to capture. When content is suggested in Yext from an admin to end-user group, it pulls metadata in Yext related to each end user’s workspace and appends it to the URL when it gets published. The result is that specific variable information is tracked and collected when a viewer clicks the link.

For example:

• If the domain name was yext.com, Yext would automatically add the UTM tag for the Reference ID into the URL. This workflow allows the end-user to be attributed to the link, allowing admins to understand where traffic to the URL originated from
• In this example, if individual end users Josh and Louis both share the post from their workspace, their attribution would be added to the link. Therefore, if Louis’s link receives more attention and clicks than Josh's, their admin teams will be able to track where the success came from

How is referral traffic related to URL Attribution?
What is URL Translation and Advisor Attribution?
What are Dynamic URLs?
FAQs

How is referral traffic related to URL Attribution?

Tracking referral traffic is a great way to show the ROI of your program. For example, let’s say your company generated 50,000 referrals this year. The average Cost per Click in the financial service industry, at the time of recording this, is $3.43. This CPC value is dynamic and can be changed based on line of business. That referral traffic is worth $171,500. With URL Attribution, you are able to determine exactly where your social referral traffic came from. This will help give advisors and agents credit for the traffic and leads they helped refer back to corporate pages, as well as determine what type of content is driving the most traffic. These analytics can funnel automatically into your preferred analytics provider, making it easy for your team to analyze social link clicks.

What is URL Translation and Advisor Attribution?

By using URL Translation, Advisor Attribution allows you to add tracking parameters or manipulate a URL based on a set of rules. As an example, let’s say we were a business called Taurus Financial Services, and we owned taurus.com. One URL Translation rule could be - whenever taurus.com is in a piece of content in the Social Content Library or in an email template add a tracking code of ?publishedFromHearsay=true. This would allow us to track referral traffic generated from our advisors’ social posts and emails.
The key requirement to URL attribution is that URLs must include http or https. The URL Translation rule makes this possible. For example, www.taurus.com would not have the URL Translation rule applied to it, but https://www.taurus.com would.

Within the Yext internal system, Yext can configure a set of rules that modifies URLs based on specific domains. As an example, if the domain name was HearsaySystems.com, Yext will automatically add the following code within the URL "add ?advisor_id={workspace_id})." This workflow allows the advisor to be attributed to this action, allowing admins to understand where traffic to the URL originated from.

Some common use cases for this are:

• Add tracking codes to a URL to know which network or source the client is coming from
• Add the reference ID, or workspace ID, to a URL to track which advisor drove a client to the business

Benefits:

• Track referral traffic sent to corporate websites from your social, sites, and mail content
• Give advisors credit for the traffic/leads they refer to corporate
• Effective way to show the ROI of your program

Advisor Attribution appends specific code to the end of pre-determined URL domains and is applicable for both Suggested Content within Social, Sites, and Mail. The result is that specific variable information is tracked and collected when a viewer clicks the link, including:

The key requirement is that the URL must include http or https. To enable this feature, please consult your CSM contact at Yext for assistance with Solution Delivery Implementation. 

Examples include:

• If the domain is 'http://hearsaysystems.com', add '?scid={suggested_content_id}' to the end of the URL
• If the domain is 'http://hearsaysystems.com', add '?refid={reference_id}' to the end of the URL
• If the domain is 'http://hearsaysystems.com', add '?sn={social_network}' to the end of the URL
• If the domain is 'http://hearsaysystems.com', add '?reference_id={group_id}' to the end of the URL

What are Dynamic URLs?

If you do not wish to use this feature for all links across the specific domain, you have the option to access Dynamic URLs that can be used on a content-by-content basis.

With Dynamic URLs, admins can create templated content that automatically personalizes and links back to your advisors’ websites when published, encouraging prospects and customers to interact with the advisor’s website on a more frequent basis. Therefore, admins can create a single post that is personalized automatically for each and every one of their advisors and agents.

Whether your goal is to encourage customers to fill out a lead-form, request an appointment, or register for an event, Dynamic URLs help your organization drive clicks back to your advisor’s websites without adding any steps to how they publish content from Yext, making the experience seamless for both the end-user and admin who created the post.

Dynamic URLs can be applied to various types of Yext posts. As a Yext admin, you can create a new post within the Suggested Content Library as well as edit existing library posts to apply Dynamic URLs. You can also create a new campaign or edit an existing campaign to apply Dynamic URLs to the campaign content as well.

With help from the Yext Professional Services team, your organization will be set up properly via the the following steps:

1. An organization defines the websites they are looking to redirect traffic to and extracts the variable part of the URL for each workspace. Here’s an example: https://advisor.hearsay.com/{site.url}
2. Yext will update our back-end system with this data so that the variable part of the URL maps to content when shared from a specific workspace. Yext does this by writing the website variable into each user's workspace via API.
3. After this is set up, admins create content in the Suggested Content Library and modify the variable part of the URL so it uses the advisor website slug.

With that completed, let’s review how an admin would create a piece of Yext Content and apply a Dynamic URL to it:

1. The Admin first logs into Yext and selects the New Library Post button on the top right part of the screen.
2. In the publishing window, enter in a URL into the text box. Depending on your use case, this could be your corporate site, a general intake form, or a “find an advisor” page.
3. Your URL will generate a summary card, complete with image, headline and brief description. And below, in the Workspace Specific Link section is where you can include the Dynamic URL. In this example, it is https://advisor.hearsay.com/{site_url} . The end result is that regardless of which user or workspace shares this post, the Dynamic URL will adapt the Master URL to include information related to the end-user who shared the post, thus, directing the prospect or customer directly to the advisor’s personal website.
4. Finalize your post details by adding other important information to your post such as which social networks the post can be published to, when the post will become available in your end-user’s library, and more.
5. Once finished, click Suggest.

With this workflow, admins can create universal content which will be personalized for the end-user who shares the post. Thus, when end-user’s shares this post, the link will redirect to the advisor’s website when published from the suggested content library or a campaign.

If you are interested in applying Dynamic URLs to Yext content, identify the websites you would like to redirect traffic to, and contact your Customer Success Manager to help you get started.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can we add a parameter to denote that a URL was clicked through from 1-to-1 Outreach (vs a social network)?
A: No.

Q: Do you have to set up different URL translation rules for 1-to-1 vs. social?
A: No.

Q: What are some common uses of this feature?
A: Some common uses of this feature are:

• Adding tracking codes to a URL to know which network or source the client is coming from
• Adding the reference ID, or workspace ID, to a URL to track which advisor drove a client to the business

Q: Can a link template be provided without adding a normal link?
A: No. In order to utilize the link templating feature, a Workspace-independent link (what would normally be the only summarized link) must be provided. 

Q: What is the format of a valid link template?
A: A link template should look mostly like a regular link, except that in certain places there can be link template variables. There must be one or more valid link template variables for the link template to be valid.

Q: What is the format of a valid link template variable?
A: A link template variable consists of an open curly brace, zero or more spaces, one or more alphanumeric or underscore characters, zero or more spaces, and then a close curly brace. This is the rough translation of the regular expression that is used to determine a valid link template variable (\{\s*(\w+)\s*\}).

Examples include:

• { internal_region_identifer }
• {internal_region_identifier}
• {internalRegionIdentifer}

Please note that the value inside the curly braces should be a key that is stored with the Workspace metadata.

Q: Are there any default template variable values?
A: Yes. The Dynamic URL system provides:

• group_id - This represents the Social Workspace identifier. It is an integer value that is a unique identifier for the Workspace in the Social application.
• reference_id - This value is set by an organization per Workspace. This will be available if it has been provided to the Social application.

These values will override metadata keys named "group_id" or "reference_id."

Q: What happens if an invalid link template is provided?
A: The Workspace Content Publisher has several layers of validation on it to ensure that only valid URL templates can be provided. If the link template is invalid, it will warn before the "Suggest" button is pressed, and an error will be returned to the dialog from the server side as well.

Q: What happens if the Workspace does not have the metadata key set?
A: If the link template has template variables in it that are missing from the Workspace, the link template will not be used when publishing the content for the Workspace. Instead, the Workspace-independent link will be used.

Q: What happens if the rendered link template does not resolve to a valid URL?
A: If any HTTP or DNS failure occurs during the attempt to fetch the rendered link template URL, the Workspace-independent link will be used.

Q: Can the Workspace user modify the link summary data?
A: No.