Using URL Attribution

URL Attribution enables your company to dynamically customize the URLs of shared social content. With URL Attribution, your company can see which visitors to your URL have clicked through to marketing content and social networks. By leveraging this feature, your business can: 

• Measure the referral traffic generated by suggested corporate content that is published through Yext to social networks
• Attribute traffic to specific advisors, social networks, and suggested content in order to assess ROI and identify program improvements for its social program and direct user traffic from shared posts in a more meaningful way.
• Integrate the data being provided by Yext into your desired analytics platform of choice (i.e. Adobe, Google Analytics)

Yext will enable support for up to four corporate-owned domains with the following metadata parameters: Workspace ID, Suggested Content ID, and Social Network. 

To take advantage of this data, please coordinate with your IT/web analytics team to add the URL attributes to your analytics tool (Adobe, Google, Looker, etc.).

How does this feature work?

When agent/advisors publish to their social networks, Hearsay will automatically append the following parameters to URLs for the set of corporate-owned domains that are configured, including: 

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

Any time a social connection clicks on one of these links, the corporate web analytics team will be able to identify the specific advisor who drove the site traffic.

When an advisor publishes a corporate website link, the above set of attribution parameters is automatically added to the URL

Attributed URL, as shown in the post above: 

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, along with 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 Hearsay receives the destination domain addresses, we append UTM tags and create rules based on the referral sources an organization would like to capture. When content is suggested in Hearsay from an Admin to end-user group, we pull metadata in Hearsay related to each end-user’s workspace and append 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.

As an example, if the domain name was HearsaySystems.com, Hearsay 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-user’s 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, their admin teams will be able to track where the success came from.

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. 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.

If you would like to enable URL Attribution for your corporate-owned domains, please contact your Customer Success Manager to get started.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who do I contact to request additional values added to the URL?

A: To enable this feature, please contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM) at Hearsay for assistance.