[Data Insight] How much brand awareness can you expect from referrals? 📈

As marketers, we’ve all heard the saying “website traffic is a vanity metric.” 🙄 And yes, if you generate lots of traffic and don’t convert any of it, that’s a problem.

But let’s be real: you need traffic (and brand awareness) to start the conversion journey. It’s not the only metric you should care about, but it’s also something you want to focus on growing so you can influence more down the funnel.

That’s why measuring traffic from your referral or affiliate program is almost as important as tracking converted referrals (leads/customers). Directionally, it shows you if the messages and offers shared by your referring customers are driving people to your website. From there, you can focus on conversion.

Data insight: How much brand awareness do referrals generate?

To help you get an idea of how much brand awareness you can expect to generate from referrals, we’ve looked at anonymized data from programs run on Referral Rock for the month of June.

Stat 1: Average referral traffic

• On average, referral programs drove 1,388 brand visits (aka website sessions) a month. These are high-intent visits from people in your target market, so it’s not just any ol’ traffic…it’s high-quality traffic. We pulled this anonymized data from referral programs across Referral Rock’s user base, which includes B2B and B2C companies across a wide variety of industries (SaaS, staffing, auto services, and more).
  
  Also: this number has the potential to grow significantly as a referral program matures. CoolBot, a longtime Referral Rock customer, saw 83,000 website impressions driven from referring customers within the first few months of launching their program.

Stat 2: Average time to convert

• How long does it take for a referral who visits a website from a share link to convert to a paying customer? According to our aggregate data for the month of June, that number is 25.6 hours (just over a day).
  
  Note: This data only counts referrals who actually convert to customers…so we aren’t counting any referral who visits the website and doesn’t convert. But this shows us that referrals who do convert, do so fairly quickly. And that’s good news (and another win for brand awareness).

Start reporting on more than converted referrals

It’s time to think of website traffic (and brand awareness) as more than a vanity metric of your referral program.

When you have the ability to track how many website visits your program is generating — and see how those sessions convert — you can do a lot more to optimize your program and show its full impact.

And if you want to have referral attribution data pushed into your regular analytics tool (Google Analytics 4 👋 ), you can do that via the RR_Referral_Brand_View event.

One last thing…

Want more unique data about running referral and affiliate marketing programs? Tell us what you want to hear about next.

Plus, check out our previous deep-dive on the top referral share methods.

Until next time!

-Erin