Automating Web Analytics in Sprinklr

One of the best ways to track the impact from your social media support team is to integrate web analytics into your outbound links. This allows you to combine your social media cases to traffic and actions that happen on your website. It will also provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey throughout the care experience.

Sprinklr, as a platform, has the ability to automate the addition of Web Analytics to every link that is shared by your support agents. (If you use a built in shortener like Bit.ly.) This allows you to automatically tag every outbound link shared by your agents, without the agents having to make any choices. This can be done for any web analytics platform including Adobe, Google, Woopra and many more.

The following instructions cover how to integrate Google Analytics as your automated web analytics platform. These same steps can be followed for Adobe, Woopra or any web analytics platform with slight nuanced changes.

If you’re just getting started with Google Analytics UTM Codes then please visit the Google Campaign Builder. If you’re already comfortable with Google Analytics link tracking, go ahead and skip down to the next step.

Creating a Web Analytics Profile in Sprinklr

Step 1: To get started with setting up your automate UTM link tracking, navigate to the Global Menu in Sprinklr Space by clicking on the 9-dot menu button. Once on the main menu select the “Settings” option from the Social Core section.

Step 2: In the settings menu, select the “Web Analytics” option.

Step 3: Click on “Add Analytics Profile” in the top right corner.

Step 4: Once you are in the build module, you’re ready to set up your web analytics. The system will allow you to integrate both flexible fields and fixed fields. Flexible fields pull in metrics from Sprinklr’s publishing module like time stamps, business units, social media accounts and much more. These allow you to create unique link tagging based on who / what / when / and why links are being posted. Static fields will be something like the word “socialcare” that would indicated in Google that all links are related to Social Customer Care.

In the build module Enter:

• Name [Use something that will be easy to remember and understand later]
• Module Type = Publishing
• Analytics Profile Type = Google Analytics
  • This will automatically populate the possible fields available from Google Analytics.
• Parameter: You can now enter in either “flexible” fields for each option, or static options.
  • Use as many or as few options as you want.
    
  • Each UTM category can have one or more options selected.
  • For Campaign Source: I used four variable metric options,
    and used a “-“ to separate out each value from the next. Each time Sprinklr shortens a link, the system will look at the time-stamp, social network type, account name and business unit associated with the outbound message and add these in the code.
  • For Campaign Medium: I typed in “social-media”. This means that every link sent out will contain social-media as the medium code.

Once you are done, click on the save button to save your new profile.

Applying your Web Analytics for your team.

Web Analytics can be applied at multiple levels within Sprinklr. You can apply them for the entire Client globally, for an individual handle, or for a Campaign. My recommendation is to apply the Web Analytics at a Campaign level.

Note: Web Analytics are based on your domain, so if you operate more than one domain, you will need to repeat the following actions for each domain.

Step 1: Navigate back to the Home Menu and select “Campaigns” under the Planning Section.

Step 2: If you already have a Campaign set up for your Care Group click on the three dots next to the Campaign you want.

• If you don’t have a Campaign set up for your support team(s) now is the time to set one up. Using Campaigns allows you to group all social media metrics for your team’s outbound posts including Likes, Shares, Comments… The Campaign can be set as a default value for your agents. This way the won’t have to pick the Campaign each time they publish.

Step 3: Select the Web Analytics option from the drop down menu.

Step 4: Click on “Add another parameter”

Step 5: Add a Web Analytics profile for each domain you have.

Example: You will need to enter a line for socialservicevalue.com and one for socialservicevalue.net if you own both domains. You can either use a unique Campaign tracking for each domain, or use the same one for all. This will be dictated by how you want to slice & dice the metrics.

• Note: This can sometimes be tricky, and will require a little bit of testing. You can use a * at the beginning and end of the domain to get the coder to be more general. Example: *socialservicevalue.com* will pick up reports.socialservicevalue.com as well as the base domain.

Congratulations, you now have automated Web Analytics set up for your outbound links shared with customers.

Best Practices and Warnings:

• Warning: If you change your UTM codes after a few months of reporting it will confuse your data on the back-end. Put some time upfront into determining what you want to know. This will ensure that your historic metrics will align with what you’re doing in the future.
• Best Practice: I always recommend using the time stamp in your coding. This ensures that every link sent is unique, and you get visibility into the life of your posted links. [We currently see a 14 month lifespan on shared support links.]
• Best Practice: Make sure the variable fields you include in your UTM codes don’t have the option to be blank. Sprinklr has a lot of metrics fields that can be blank from time to time which will also confuse your link data.
• Best Practice: Setting up your Web Analytics at a Campaign level will allow you to separate out link tracking by Call Center or Business Unit. This will allow you to further refine your link and website data to determine which teams are driving what types on interactions on your website.
• Note: For this to work, the link must be shortened by Sprinklr. This can be done using any shortening platform you have integrated into Sprinklr. This can also be set as a default for the Social Media Agents so that they don’t have to select the shortener each time they publish.

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Why You Can’t Trust Sprinklr Link Clicks

Within reporting for the Sprinklr Publishing and Engagement modules you will find 8 general link tracking “Metrics”. This doesn’t even include the platform-specific link clicks like “Twitter URL Clicks”. These metrics will allow you to track the user clicks on links that your team shares on social media.  All of these metrics vary in slightly different ways, except the one way that matters the most.

Sprinklr calculates clicks based on link hashes, with no regard for the individual post. When a link is posted, it is tagged with a unique identifier, and this is permanent within the platform. So when the same link is used in multiple posts, there is no way for Sprinklr to know which post it is based off. Because of this, clicks are attributed to the first post, and compound over time.

Note: This is true even when you are auto-tagging links with web analytics, which would theoretically create a unique url each time.

While this might lead to some issues for teams publishing marketing and PR content, it is a major issue for Care groups. This is because care teams tend to share the same links repeatedly. If you think about the 80/20 rule, the majority of your incoming support tickets are going to relate to a few recurring items. These will be thinks like: Reset my password, what deals do you currently have, my billing is wrong, and so on.

Let me demonstrate this with one of the most basic link types that our teams share. When working with customers on Account related issues, we move them from the Twitter public space to the Twitter DM space. THis is done via a direct link to the associated handle’s DM. 

In one month we shared our direct link to Twitter DM 4,867 times. When you look at the example report below you see this same link listed over and over again with over 25k clicks. While anyone would all be ecstatic to have this many clicks on a sales link shared organically in Twitter, we know that this is an absurd value for a Care link. This overstates the click values by millions because we share this link hundreds of time a day, and it is constantly adding up the number of clicks that this link receives.

Side Note: For reasons we still don’t understand, our monthly report has spit out 603 unique click counts, which I’ve been pushing back on Sprinklr about. Based on their explanation I should have 4,867 duplications of the same number since the link hash remains constant.

Synopsis:

Problem: If you are sharing links with your customers through Sprinklr, and then using Sprinklr to track the click rates, your numbers are most likely exaggerated. The more often you are sharing a specific url, the more painful the impact becomes.

Partial Resolution: Your best bet is to always apply web analytics tagging to every link that you share. You can then rely on your web analytics for an accurate count of traffic coming in to your channel. To learn more about how to do this view my blog post here. Note, this will only work for links to domains you own. At the end of the day, links like the direct to DM link in the example can’t be tracked by your web analytics.

If you have any questions on this topic feel free to drop them in the comments section!