All Collections
Report on your consultation
Understanding the traffic sources
Understanding the traffic sources

Use this resource to help you understand where your consultation traffic is coming from.

Vishwas Prasad avatar
Written by Vishwas Prasad
Updated over a week ago

When reporting on the reach of your engagement activities you might want a breakdown of how participants arrived at" or "of how the traffic arrived at.

EngagementHQ Traffic Sources allows you to better understand where your participants' visits originated and if they lead to informed or engaged visits. Traffic Sources overview makes up a part of EngagementHQ's Summary Report and provides essential information about these traffic channels.

Traffic sources data will reflect your communications activities. So the more promotion you do, the more data you should see in these reports. Remember, promotion is also key to your project's success, so properly planning out which promotional channels you are going to use for your consultation are crucial.

Why do I need to know where my traffic came from?

In order to track traffic from these locations, traffic sources allow you to peer into the success and failures of your various promotional activities.

Having a clear understanding of your traffic sources will help you know if one medium has performed better than another and helped you better target your promotion.

For instance, if you have done an extensive social media campaign yet most of your engagement has come from direct email campaigns, then you might question whether your social media message was targeted at the right audience or whether the message contained the right call-to-action.

Using this information will greatly help you improve your future promotions planning and help your respond to current trends.

What will it show me?

Traffic Sources will show the amount of traffic your consultation has received from the following;

  • Direct - How many people entered your site by typing the URL directly into the address bar of their browser. This traffic might also be due to:

            - links within emails that were sent and were not coming from EngagementHQ.
            - for some visits, the source of where visitors came from may not be traceable, hence they would show as direct.
            - people that have previously visited that site and therefore have it saved in their browser history might visit the site directly too. They start typing it in their browser and the browser auto-fills it
            - some of these visits could be from certain mobile apps that do not allow referrer tracking

  • Social - Traffic generated by social media including; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram

  • Email - Sources of traffic that arrived at your site via direct email campaigns using EngagementHQ and other external email tools. (External email tools will need a special tracking link in order to show up in these results. See Below)

  • Search Engines - Traffic generated via search engine searches including Google, Bing, and more.

  • .GOV Sites - Any site with a .gov or .govt that refers traffic to your consultation.

  • Referrals - Displays traffic from links on any other non-government website. This would include any community groups or individuals with websites who are promoting the project to others by inserting a link directing traffic to your consultation.

EngagementHQ has developed a custom-built analytics engine that classifies referring URLs. This system looks at traffic sources and then classifies them into Search, Social and .Gov sites as indicated above. This system is independent of other traffic analytics tools such as Google Analytics and is specifically built for EngagementHQ.

How to read the numbers?

The numbers should be read row-wise for each traffic channel. The aware visits account for 100% of the visits and the informed and engaged are also represented as a percentage of it. For example, through the direct channel there were 140 visits in total, of that 82 ( 82 of 140 as a percentage is 58.6%) are informed visits too and 62 ( 62 of 140 as a percentage is 44.3%) are engaged visits as well. To refresh your understanding of these types of visits read our article on What is engaged, informed and aware?

Generating Traffic Sources Report

In order to generate a Traffic Sources report you will need to do the following;

Go to the Reporting page > Project Reports section of EngagementHQ.
1. From the Summary screen, select the project/s and date range that you wish to analyze. Note: The date range All time automatically selects the start date from the day the site was launched and not from the day the site was created.
2. Scroll down and view the Traffic Sources data.
3. Use the export icon to export the graph as an image file to use in your reports.
4. You can also see the Traffic Sources information in the Summary Report .pdf by clicking on the Download button.

Tracking External Email Clients

EngagementHQ Traffic Sources also allows you to track links embedded in emails sent by third-party mail tools like Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor. In order to track traffic from these locations, you need to include a simple code at the end of the links contained in your email.

Add the following to the end of your hyperlinks for custom tracking;

utm_medium=email&utm_source=custom_text

*'custom_text' can be replaced with the respective word that will be used to identify the traffic source in the reports.

This will make your links look something like this;

This will ensure that external emails are tracked with Traffic Sources.

Note: QR Codes with links can also be tracked by using the UTM code option. These will appear in the Traffic sources section of the Summary and detailed excel reports. However, the exact number of referrals for the same will not be available.

The best way to get the data from QR codes is to use Google Analytics as it allows tracking data at campaign levels.

Contact our support team if you need any further assistance via chat or email support@engagementhq.com

Did this answer your question?