Optimize your acquisition channels with Acquisition Analysis

Acquisition Analysis provides detailed insights into how users arrive at your website, helping you evaluate the effectiveness of your acquisition sources. By analyzing this data, you can:

• Identify top-performing channels
• Measure how channels drive acquisition, engagement, and conversion
• Evaluate campaign performance

Set up your analysis

1. Set the date range and user segment.

2. Filter by acquisition source to understand which channels perform better than others. You can group your data using primary and secondary acquisition sources.

For example, see how marketing channels perform across desktop and mobile, measure the impact of email campaigns, or compare the performance of top landing pages.

Note: Transaction events are currently the only available Conversion option.

Interpet the data 

Use the metrics in the table to see any outliers in your acquisition channels.

In this example we want to analyze the performance between the top two landing pages to understand which page to invest more budget into (this will also depend on your goal).

1. Set the primary group by ‘Landing page’

2.  Use the ‘Users’ and ‘Engagement’ metrics to see which page attracts more users and the overall bounce rate.

3. Use the ‘Conversion: transaction’ metrics to understand which page has a better overall conversion and new user conversion rate.

• Look at the difference between the overall traffic of each page and its conversion rates to see if one page is converting higher than the other, especially for new users.
• Consider what makes one of the landing pages more compelling (copy, UX, CTA's).

4. Use the value metrics to understand which users spend more per transaction.

In this example, we can see that EN users spend more per transaction versus FR users. In this scenario, we could consider optimizing the EN page for repeat purchasers or a higher conversion rate to maximize revenue.

Understand attribution

Understanding where users are coming from and how attribution affects conversion rates is crucial to a successful marketing strategy. Contentsquare automatically captures this data, but there are a few things you should know about how this data is captured to get the most out of using Contentsquare to measure attribution.

All available breakdowns are last touch properties, meaning this is the final touch point the customer interacts with before making a purchase or completing a desired action.

How does Marketing channel work

Contentsquare’s default Marketing Channel property is based on the combination of referrer, UTM Source, and UTM Medium values for the session. Our UTM parameters are all based on parameters appended to the URL via manual tagging.

Google Ads: manual & auto-tagging best practices

If you want to use Google Ads auto-tagging for a deep integration with Google Analytics and you don't want to have to manually tag all of your ads so that they are also recognizable in the Acquisition Analysis capability of User Lifecycle extension, follow these steps for a quick solution on manual and auto-tagging for Google Ads.

Note: The only methods that will capture UTM parameters are those that begin with ‘utm_’

Within Google Ads, you can use ValueTrack and custom parameters along with a tracking template to automatically generate a tagged URL with all of the information you need. A tracking template which populates the query string with campaignid, adgroupid, and keyword looks like this:

{lpurl}?campaignid={campaignid}&adgroupid={adgroupid}&term={keyword}

Then when someone clicks on one of your ads, {lpurl} will be replaced with your landing page, and the rest of the parameters will be expanded to contain the campaign id, ad group id, and keyword. For a list of all parameters and instructions on how to set this up, see Google's support docs on Setting up tracking with ValueTrack parameters.

To get the actual campaign and ad content rather than just the IDs which aren't that useful, you need to use custom parameters at the campaign and ad level and then use the parameters like this:

{lpurl}?utm_source=google&utm_medium={ifsearch:cpc}{ifcontent:display}&utm_campaign={_campaign}&utm_term={keyword}&utm_content={_content}

At the campaign level, you'll need to set up a customer parameter named _campaign containing the URL encoded name of the campaign. At the individual ad level, you'll need to set up a parameter named _content containing the URL encoded title of the ad. You can include these columns in your CSV upload by deriving them from the ad and campaign names. You can find the full list of CSV columns mappings in Google's documentation on CSV file columns.

For more information on setting up custom parameters, check out this Google documentation on Creating custom parameters for advanced tracking.

Lastly, within Google Analytics, you'll want to check the following option at the property level:

Allow manual tagging (UTM values) to override auto-tagging (GCLID values)

This will allow Google Analytics to merge the auto-tagging data from the gclid parameter with your manual (automatic) tagging.

For more information about the manual override, see Google's documentation on Using auto-tagging for non-Analytics purposes.

Metrics

Users

• All users: Total unique users within the selected date range.
• New users: Unique users experiencing their first session within the selected date range.
  
  

Engagement

• Sessions: Total sessions within the selected date range.
• Bounce rate: Percentage of sessions with only one pageview.
• First session bounce rate: Bounce rate specifically for first sessions.
• Session duration: Median session duration (excluding bounced sessions).
• First session duration: Median duration of first sessions (excluding bounced sessions).
• Time engaged: Median time users actively interacted (excluding idle time exceeding 60 seconds).
• First session time engaged: Median engagement time for first sessions (excluding idle time exceeding 60 seconds).
• Sessions per new user: Average sessions per new user.
• Pageviews: Total pageviews within the selected date range.
• Pages per session: Average pageviews per session.

Conversion (e-commerce projects)

• Total: Number of conversion events.
• Converting users: Users who completed a conversion event.
• Conversion rate: Percentage of sessions resulting in a conversion.
• New user conversion rate: Conversion rate specifically for new users.
• Value: Sum of all conversion values.
• Value per conversion: Average value per conversion event.
• Value per user: Average conversion value per unique user.
• Value per session: Average conversion value per session.

Acquisition sources

• Marketing channel: This is the breakdown selected by default. It categorizes the traffic based on conditions using UTM parameters and referrers (e.g., Paid Social, Display, Email).
• Referrer: Shows the websites or sources sending traffic to your site. This information is extracted from the HTTP referrer header sent by the user's browser.
• Landing page: The first page users land on when arriving at your site. This is determined by analyzing the URL of the page that was first accessed in a user's session.
• UTM Source: Track the source of your traffic based on UTM parameters (e.g., Google, Facebook, Newsletter) extracted from URL query parameters.
• UTM Medium: Identify the marketing medium used (e.g., cpc, email, social) by analyzing UTM parameters in the URL.
• UTM Term: Analyze the performance of specific keywords used in your campaigns, also obtained from UTM parameters in the URL.
• UTM Content: Differentiate between different versions of your ad content or links by examining UTM parameters in the URL.
• UTM Campaign: Track the overall performance of specific marketing campaigns, again using UTM parameters found in the URL.
• Device Type: Track performance across desktop, mobile, and tablet. This information is typically derived from the user-agent string sent by the user's browser, which contains details about the device and operating system.
• Country: Determined using the IP addresses upon tracking. Note that IP addresses are not stored though.

Marketing channel property definitions