Referral sources recommendations. Excluding Referral Sources
Hello my dears!
Today we will talk about analysis of VKontakte community statistics. I will tell you how to do the analysis correctly, what the main indicators mean and how you can benefit from it.
Statistics are the core of any community, from it you can determine everything that happened to the community, when it happened and why (of course, after analyzing the indicators). It is especially necessary to analyze statistics when buying advertising in communities, exchanging posts, or selling and buying the community itself.
Statistics are available at https://vk.com/stats?gid=XXXXXXXX
Where XXXXXXXXX– this is the community id
Now let's talk more about the graphs. The statistics include three main blocks:
Attendance
Activity
Let's look at each one separately, focusing on important points.
Attendance
Unique visitors and views
Number of unique visitors who visited the community during the day (by day, by month)
Total number of unique visitors in the last 30 days
This indicator is definitely important, but it’s easy to inflate, so we don’t stop our analysis on it.
Gender/Age
I think it’s clear here that if the public is male, there should be men; if it’s female, on the contrary, if this is not the case, then either the topic changed or they used bots. Children no more than 30% -35% is normal.
Geography
You can find out where people are visiting your community from this diagram.
Referral sources
Here we see where people come into the community from and what to focus on.
Pay closer attention to the source " Browser Tabs“If their indicator is more than 60-80%, most likely there is a fact of cheating by offers or bots.
Participants
Number of people who came and unsubscribed
If you see large peaks of unsubscribed participants on the graph, most likely the community was being cleaned of suspicious accounts. This tells us that the group was promoted by offers or bots. In 70% of cases this is confirmed.
Section views
They allow you to find out what people are interested in.
Coverage
Here the count comes from people who have seen news from the public over a certain period of time.
Audience coverage is divided into full and subscribers.
Full- this is the number of people who saw the news of the public from friends, in other publics through reposts, simply came in, looked in the news, shared.
By subscribers- these are people who see your news, being subscribed to your community.
The only indicator that is impossible to increase is subscriber coverage
, it should be from 25% of all subscribers with 15-25 posts per day.
The remaining graphs are similar to attendance, but based on data from community subscribers, that is, who receives news by gender/age and in which countries.
Activity
Activity does not need comments, I will only say that the better the posts, the more activity, stolen posts and button accordions will get few likes and reposts, even if your public is in good condition.
Tips for increasing community statistics depending on the situation:
If everything is at the proper level, but there is little activity, increase the quality of the content.
If your coverage is low, exchange reposts with other publics.
If your subscriber reach is low, increase the number of posts.
If there are few unique visitors, work on the design, hold competitions, and make the subscriber come back again and again.
If you have many children, increase the meaning of your posts.
I hope you found today’s information useful and will put it into practice!
Leave your feedback and opinions in the comments below.
Articles on the topic 
In order not to waste your entire budget on ineffective promotion channels, you need to analyze the data after each advertising launch. "Yandex. Metrica or Google.Analytics help track transitions to a site from a variety of sources, but these systems do not provide specific information so that you can accurately determine which ad is producing results and which is not. Therefore, you need to do some of the work of tracking traffic yourself.
Metrica and Analytics automatically identify certain types of transitions:
- Transitions from search engines (Organic Search).
- Direct calls (Direct).
- Follows links on the site (Referral).
- Transitions from social networks (Social).
- Advertising systems (Adwords, Yandex).
The problem is that such statistics do not allow you to analyze every advertisement, link or banner. For example, in the “Transitions from Social Networks” report you will be able to see the number of transitions from VKontakte, Facebook, Pinterest and other well-known sites, but you will not know where exactly - from a post in some group, advertising advertisements, link in profile - the transition has been completed.
Let's say you advertise a site on VKontakte by buying advertising posts in groups and simultaneously testing several targeted ads. In analytics systems, all of them will be marked as transitions from VKontakte. If you consider that in addition to paid advertising, you may also have organic transitions from VK, this confuses the cards even more.
How then to deal with all this chaos?
UTM tags
UTM tags are the easiest and most effective way to track traffic sources. SMM specialists and those who set up advertising in Yandex.Direct and Google.Adwords are well acquainted with them. But this tool has a much wider range of applications - banner advertising, posts on forums, links in your own accounts and groups, offline leaflets, etc.
UTM tags can also be useful for analyzing the effectiveness of free traffic channels. For example, if you place links in Yandex.Zen articles and want to find out whether they are clicked on at all, whether the links at the bottom of the article are effective, etc. Or, for example, you have a VKontakte group, and people can click to the site via links in the group menu or posts on the wall (including pinned ones). Statistics will help you determine whether they are useful in your case and which formats work more effectively.
In general, UTM tags provide a convenient and useful toolkit, and for what purposes to use it is up to you. The main thing is to follow certain rules when creating them.
To understand how UTM tags are created, you need to understand URL parameters. In this case, we are dealing with standardized parameters, the values of which depend on the type of traffic you use. All this can be done manually, but there are simpler solutions, which we will talk about later.
Parameters can be swapped, but their name cannot be changed - otherwise the analytics system will not recognize the label. The parameter values may vary, but, again, it is better to stick to the most understandable, generally accepted values.
Three parameters are required:
- utm_source – source (yandex, google, vk, Instagram, email, etc.). A complete list of recommended values for this parameter for different advertising systems can be found in the Yandex help;
- utm_medium – channel. Options: cpc (pay-per-click advertising), cpm (pay-per-impression advertising), affiliate (affiliate traffic), price (transfers from aggregators, for example, Yandex.Market), social_post (advertising post on a social network), etc. d.;
- utm_campaign – campaign name (you can enter it manually or use a dynamic parameter).
There are others:
- utm_content – ad content (any information to differentiate ads);
- utm_term is a keyword.
Another label for identifying the source is utm_referer. It is used so that the referrer parameter (which you have probably seen in affiliate links, for example) does not “fall off” when navigating to the site during a JavaScript redirect or from a site with the https protocol (if your site is accessible via http).
For some cases it is more convenient to use dynamic parameters. So, for example, you will not need to enter the names of campaigns for advertising in Yandex.Direct - they will be automatically sent to Metrica. The following parameters are specified in curly braces:
- (ad_id) or (banner_id) – ad or banner identifier (number);
- (campaign_id) – campaign identifier (number);
- (keyword) – the keyword for which the ad was shown.
You can see the full list of Yandex.Direct dynamic parameters. You can pass several values at once in one parameter, connecting them with a dot:
www.site.ru/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=(campaign_id)&utm_content=(position_type).(position)&utm_term=(keyword)
There are a large number of UTM tag builders that allow you to quickly and conveniently create your own links by substituting the required values. Plus, a short link is automatically generated. The simplest and most convenient service is UtmUrl. The MyURL builder contains a set of ready-made tag values for different platforms (Yandex.Direct, e-mail, Facebook feed, etc.).
To view statistics on tags in Yandex.Metrica, you need to select the appropriate report:
In the window that opens, you can see a graph of transitions from different sources and detailed statistics for each tag.
Bounce rate, browsing depth, and time on site are important information that can be used in addition to conversion statistics to improve advertising effectiveness. Using Webvisor, you can analyze user behavior on the page. Well, to get statistics on conversions based on UTM tags, don’t forget to set goals.
To view statistics on UTM tags in Google Analytics, you need to open the “Traffic Sources” menu, then “All Traffic” and select the “Source/Channel” tab. The data will be shown in source/medium format.
If you need to view information for a specific campaign, click on the source link and in the “Main Option” menu, open the “Other” menu. Then, from the Traffic Sources list, select Campaigns.
You can track transitions to a website using UTM tags not only from online, but also from offline sources. This can be easily done using a QR code.
First, let's create a label in the linker with all the necessary parameters:
Now let's go to the QR code generator. For example, this one. Select the desired option: “encode – link to the site.” Enter the received address.
In general, promotional codes are usually used for discounts, but with the help of QR codes you can test a variety of types of advertising using more detailed statistics. This is necessary if clients are brought by different channels.
Openstat and From tags
In addition to UTM, there are also From and Openstat tags, which are recognized by Yandex.Metrica, but not recognized by GoogleAnalytics. The From label only indicates the source of the referrals. It is convenient to use for email traffic (site.ru?from=email).
By the way, about traffic from emails. In this case, it is necessary to mark links, otherwise transitions to the site will be marked as direct. If you have several mailings or, for example, you want to track the effectiveness of a specific letter (or call to action), UTM tags are better suited for these purposes. In this case, the link must contain the utm_medium parameter with the value email or e-mail, and utm_source can be given any value (for example, the name of the newsletter).
The _openstat label can be added by enabling this option on the campaign settings page in the “Metrica” block in “Yandex.Direct”. In addition to Yandex.Metrica, you can also view Openstat tags on Liveinternet and the Openstat service of the same name. You can create them for other purposes (except Direct) (all the necessary parameters are available). The output is data in encoded form: mysite.ru/?_openstat=ZGlyZWN0O2NwYzs7.
Short link services for collecting statistics
I often post links to my VKontakte group in posts on the Yandex.Zen channel. It was interesting whether people follow the links, but VKontakte statistics do not allow us to obtain specific data - “external sites” are simply shown as sources. In addition, statistics indicate the ratio as a percentage, but I need specific numbers.
The solution to the problem was link shorteners. For example, goo.gl. It shows the number of clicks and even small statistics by country and device. Although it will soon be time to look for an alternative – the service will be closed on March 30, 2019.
By the way, the statistics of VKontakte groups can be a little confusing - it is not always clear what is meant by a particular referral source. IN
This statistics appeared quite recently, but many public and group administrators have already appreciated its benefits. Of course, while statistics show results for a limited period of time and it is too early to judge the growth or decline of certain indicators, however, they already give an understanding of which direction to work in.
As an example, let's take statistics our VKontakte group(picture above).
Our section shows the maximum number of transitions "Browser bookmarks". What it is? This is an indicator of what percentage of a group’s audience is so interested in its content that they even made a special bookmark in their browser. As a rule, only the most important and interesting resources for the user become bookmarks, therefore, we can be proud of ourselves - almost 50% of our audience is loyal to us.
The second largest indicator is conversions from the list "My groups." For us it is almost 14.5%, however, there is clearly a need to increase this figure, because these transitions are the second indicator of subscriber loyalty. However, 14.5% is also a very good figure.
The third indicator that cannot but interest an SMM specialist - uh then transitions from the news. Who are these people? All these transitions are those who saw our news in their feed or friends’ feed and clicked on it. Our figure is almost 12%, which means that every 8.33 users came to us this way.
Index "External Sites"- these are transitions from sites other than search engines to our group via a link. Every tenth visitor comes from there.
"Communities Widget"- this is actually an indicator of the effectiveness of the site and at the same time a counter of transitions to social networks. As a rule, widgets do not provide a very high percentage of transitions from a website to social networks, since social networks and a website initially pursue slightly different goals.
"Community Pages" is an indicator that reflects either the level of display of links in user “Links” tabs, or the success of advertising in other communities, and since we have not advertised our group recently, the conclusion is obvious.
"User Pages"- this is statistics of user transitions from their “Interesting Pages”, from their personal pages or from other people’s pages. Essentially, this is viral advertising, whose rate grows over time. In addition, when analyzing this indicator, it is also worth taking into account the specifics of the social network. On Facebook, for example, viral content spreads much better.
“VK search results”- this is the number of people who looked for us through the internal search of a social network.
"Search engines"- a result that reflects the number of users who came to us using the Yandex and Google search.
As you can see, the new statistics are a very necessary and useful tool in assessing the success of a group.
Keep track of your community's statistics. All basic indicators are presented in “Community Statistics”. You can take analytical data from already known services.
Alignment of indicators is not “expulsion of undesirables,” but a systematic increase in the target audience.
Those who made an impulsive decision to join your group may themselves leave it in the future; this is a normal phenomenon.
But, if there are many such exits (keep in mind that everything is relative), think again about the fact that maybe people are expecting one thing, but in fact the community is talking about something else. There is no need for tricks and ambiguity in the content (“now I will lure them all and how will I start selling to them!”).
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Working with the geography of participants
Considering the scale of the project, try to equalize the number of participants by region. This is evidenced by the “Geography” percentage in community statistics. 
Example: in addition to the local market, where you need to continue to strengthen your position, you may need to more actively reach users in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Working with the gender and age of the target group
Look at your audience, it also says a lot. It is necessary to understand who is missing (gender and age) and address this audience in the language of values when promoting. 
With whom and with what words you communicate and call, he comes to your community.
Referral sources
Referral sources will indicate how your community was found and visited. Increasing referrals from search engines indicate that your community is beginning to be actively indexed, which means you need to be more attentive to keywords in microblog entries.
The number of transitions from “My Groups” reflects how you have a core of enthusiastic audience. Transitions from user pages indicate the effectiveness of viral distribution of your content.
And transitions from internal search are an indicator of how functional the name of the community is, how easy it is to find you through the internal search of VKontakte (and this is a natural influx!).
Analyze these indicators and draw conclusions. Here's a full breakdown of what each source means.
- Community pages (48.96%) - transitions from other communities. Links in group posts, repost titles and the “Links” block
- User pages (12.06%) - from the walls of other users. Links in user posts, repost titles and the “Interesting Pages” block
- Browser bookmarks (10.90%) - bookmarks in the browser, as well as transitions to direct links entered into the address bar
- My groups (7.42%) - transition from the "My groups" list
- Search engines (6.50%) - Google, Yandex and others
- External sites (5.57%) - transitions from external sites (transitions through the widget are counted separately)
- News (3.25%) - transitions from the "News" section. Typically subscribers who navigated from their news feed
- VK search results (3.02%) - internal search VKontakte
- Community widget (2.32%) - widgets on websites. This graph is a great way to check its effectiveness
- Top communities (0%) - referrals from the page vk.com/communities
- Recommendations (0%) - transitions from the page vk.com/feed?section=recommended, including the “Recommended communities and pages” block
- Applications (0%) - transitions from VK applications. For example, the "Application Group" link below
- Advertising (0%) - only for communities that were advertised through VKontakte. Information from a similar graph in the advertising section is duplicated here
Photo rating
Using the free service Socialstats.ru, you can see which photos are popular and get more likes or comments.
You will see in numbers what your audience likes. Of course, not everyone likes and leaves comments, but, nevertheless, people declare their sympathies and ask. Be aware of interests.