How to track social shares to improve queue position

Hi,

I’m wondering how one might go about tracking the number of times that a user shares or emails something and then using that to improve their queue position in a pre-launch line. The social media add-ins don’t seem to have a workflow associated with them so not sure how I would do this.

The basic idea would work exactly like in this example from when RobinHood launched. Look roughly 1/3 down the page on the following link: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/tactics-product-shares/

Thanks!

I thought a lot about it too. Tracking Referral is actually not that easy.

MixPanel can help tracking the connection, defining a funnel.

On Bubble level, a quite quick thing to set up is defining in the link you get your user share a parameter ?referrer=[something that identifies a user]. On the destination page, count the number of incoming connection linked on this referrer. If the user sign up, you can also save who was the initial referrer. Exporting these data, you’ll be able to find out who were the most influential users.

Be sure the feature is really important for your business. Referral statistics are often broken, so often, not relevant with to few users.

Can you put the social share button in a group ? And then do an “on click” action on it ?

I guess the best way would be to have AddToAny trigger an API workflow in Bubble when a share is made. But that would be a lot more complex.

Thanks for the responses Nicolas and Nigel. I’ve been reading through some other threads to try and understand how to send and retrieve the referrer parameter but I’m not quite getting it 100%. Is there an example of how this might work that shows all the steps?

  1. Creating the link with appropriate parameter
  2. Retrieving the parameter on the destination page

Apologies if this is obvious. I’m still relatively new to Bubble.

Referrals does get complex, and it does depend what you are deeming a “referral”.

A click on the refer button ? (easily spoofed with multiple clicks)
An actual “share” ? (very hard as you don’t get told when someone actually uses, say, the Facebook share dialog). AddToAny / AddThis can help somewhat here.
An actual “referral” (so someone clicking on the shared link) ?
An action based on the referral (so a sign up) ?

Referral technology tends to use cookie tracking rather than link tracking. People click the shared link, a cookie (containing the sharers / channels unique id) is dropped. Then if they happen to go back to page later via search rather than the link and sign up … you fire a tracking pixel, read the cookie and bingo. Well, mostly Bingo, that is how most of the affiliate networks do their tracking and it isn’t all that reliable.

tl:dr

If you want to track clicks on AddtoAny, put the widget in a group, then run an action to add to a count.
If you want to track referral traffic as well, add a parameter to the sharing URL … which could be current users id.

then pull it back in on page load.

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Thank you Nigel!

I now have this working at a basic level. I think the type of referral that is most desirable are the last two in your list.

  • Someone clicking on the shared link
  • An action (like signup) based on the referral

I’ve been able to create the parameter in the URL and pull it into my page or group as desired and then credit the appropriate referrer.

The only thing I don’t know how to do is place that referring ID in a temporary holding pattern in a cookie or other container so that if the user navigates away from the site, or onto other pages, I can still give proper credit to the referrer if they then sign up later.

Is there a way to do this in bubble?

Thanks again.

I think it just occurred to me that the ActivityLog type that you suggested is meant to accomplish the very task I just asked about. Would it be necessary to clean that log every so often to remove activity that’s over say 30 days old?

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Ok so I’ve quasi solved my own question with at least one outstanding issue remaining. Here is what happens currently when someone clicks on a referral link:

First the refer parameter is stored in the refer_id of the activity log

Then, when the new potential user goes to sign up, I created a workflow that grabs the most recent activitylog’s refer_id and uses that to credit the referrer.

The problem with this is that in the unlikely event that two users create activity logs in close succession to each other, the latest activity log might not be referencing the right user.
Example:

  • User1 lands on site from referral ID 123 at 1:00pm and creates activity log
  • User2 lands on side form referral ID 456 at 1:01pm and creates activity log
  • User1 then goes to sign up and my program mistakenly pulls refer_ID 456 because it is the latest one.

Thus, what other identifier can I store in the activity log that would allow me to correctly identify the computer in question. I would use location but that requires permission from the user which I would rather not ask for before they are a registered user. IP perhaps?

I too am curious how this would be done. Mine is similar in that I would like to provide a user with a referral link and then once a person that clicks through has signed up it credits the referrer. It’s less about tracking and more about growth hacking though.

What you would often do in this situation (which is essentially affiliate tracking) is to drop a cookie on the user’s machine which the referral id in it).

The way we can do that is store the Referral Id (which could just be the unique id of the user doing the referral) on the User - so User 1 and User 2 get different data.

Then when they actually signup you know where they came from. As long as they are on the same computer.

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The approach I’m taking with my app is that every user has a public profile page.

So they share that page and on that page is the signup link that specifically credits the referring user.
For my app the user can also share ratings and companies they add - the workflow would also be the same for each of those shared items.

Same as @jake mine is designed for growth hacking where I’m using this to give points, badges to reward users for driving traffic.

Also, check this out.