Update: We are no longer offering the ability to purchase a license to sell PC games starting December 1, 2021. On March 1, 2022, we are sunsetting store channel functionality. You can read more at this article.
So you've posted some links to your Discord store page and want to know how they're performing. We use UTM parameters to help you track "conversions on traffic" you're sending to your Discord store page.
But why bother tracking conversions? Isn't it good enough to count the number of 'clicks' on a Google Ad or link in a Twitter post? Good questions! Link clicks will give you a sense for traffic but not all traffic is the same.
When we drive traffic to Discord, one of the things we want visitors to do is register. For us, this is a type of "conversion." When we looked at our own data, it was pretty common for our best source of traffic to NOT be our best source of registrations (i.e. maybe they were lower intent visitors). So, we track the percent of visits that turn into registration, or "conversion to registration," to make sure that the time or money we spend on channels is worth it.
When you drive traffic to your Discord store page, your "conversion" event would be a user acquiring the game. This guide will help you understand how to use UTM parameters to track conversions. You'll be able to measure things like:
- Did my one video on Youtube drive more purchases than all my effort (and $$$) on Google Ads?
- How do I compare this big-time influencer's post, which drove a lot of traffic, to this smaller streamer who drove less traffic but spent time showcasing my game?
- Facebook sends more traffic than Twitter to my Discord store page but is it really better at driving purchases?
Quick Start
Step 1: Grab the link to your store page
Step 2: Prepare your UTM parameters
- Decide the parameters for the 5 UTM fields: source, medium, campaign, term, and content. Example values can be found below.
- Append the unique identifier '--sku[your sku ID]' in the content field. This is important! Without it, we won't be able to track the link's performance.
- Add UTM properties to the end of your link from Step 1 (Google offers a handy UTM link builder here)
Step 3: Share link externally
- Use a link shortener (like Bitly) when the link will be visible
- Hyperlink text if blogpost/email/etc.
- For campaign managers (e.g. Facebook Ads), there is usually an explicit form where you can specify your UTM parameters
Step 4: See conversion data for each link in the developer portal!
- We track "conversions" as purchases— or "acquisition" if free-to-play—of a game within 24 hours
Example original link: https://www.discordapp.com/store/skus/488607666231443456/minion-masters
Example link after adding UTM parameters for a hypothetical twitter post:
Full Guide
Let's say you want to post about your new game on Twitter to drive pre-orders. We'll use BetaDwarf's Minion Masters as an example.
Step 1: Grab a link to your store listing page
You can find your link in the web app or by clicking the link icon in the desktop app.
In this case, the link to the Minion Master's store page is:
https://discordapp.com/store/skus/488607666231443456/minion-masters
The problem with this link is when people visit we know nothing about where they came from! We'll fix this in Step 2.
Step 2: Prepare UTM parameters
UTM parameters are a set of 'tags' that you can add on to the end of a link. It's a widely-supported system to help track where visitors to a website are coming from.
Let's say you post a link to your Discord store page on your own website. To use an analogy, think of the link itself as an airplane bringing visitors to the destination: The Discord store page. The UTM parameters are like the baggage tags; they allow the destination to know where the visitor came from and how.
There are five tags:
- source: name of the place the visitor came from
- medium: "how" the visitor arrived
- campaign: Describes the "initiative" that brought the visitor
- term: Any terms associated with the link, if applicable (e.g. Google Adwords)
- content Further descriptions of the link to help distinguish variations. We require that you to add --sku[your sku id] to this field for our tracking to work.
You can use whatever values you want but it's best to standardize the values you choose to make interpretation and analysis easy. We recommend the following:
Properties for source and medium:
Your sku ID can be found as the number in the URL itself or in your portal:
Best practices: no spaces, no capitalization, and use dashes to separate words. These fields will be visible to the visitors so avoid terms that might cause insult.
In our scenario, we want to post about our new game on Twitter, so we'll choose the following parameters:
- source: twitter
- medium: social
- campaign: launch
- term: n/a
- content: --sku488607666231443456
We can use Google's UTM Builder to generate our completed link:
That's all the setup needed! We're now ready to begin sharing this link.
Step 3: Share the link
If we were hyperlinking something in a blog or on our homepage, people wouldn't see the full link. But since we're posting it on Twitter, people will see it. It's not very pretty.
We can use any URL shortener to make this more easy to share. Be sure to shorten the entire link from Step 2, including the UTM parameters.
In our example, we used a popular, free link-shortening service called Bitly to create a shortened link: http://bit.ly/2tNKWLr
We can post this link on Twitter and drive traffic that Discord can now track for conversions!
Step 4: Tracking Conversion
Since we'll be able to see that visitors arrived from this link we'll be able to report back how many people "converted."
We define "conversion" as a visitor who acquired the game—the one associated with the sku ID you labeled in the utm_content field—within 24 hours of visiting. For games that have a price, this means a purchase took place and the game has been added to their library. For free-to-play games this only means the visitor added the game to their library.
Results will be available in your developer portal. In our above example, you might expect to see something like this:
A note on re-using links: We will show you results for each unique combination of tags that we find. Which means you can—and should—use the same link with the same set of tags multiple times if you want to see the results aggregated together. A good rule of thumb to figure out whether you should re-use UTM tags is: "Do I want to see one row of results or many rows of results?"
Say your custom home page has a link to your Discord store page in each the header, the body, and the footer. If you want to see one row of data for just "traffic from my homepage," then you can use the same link with the same tags in all three spots. You'll get back one row of data that sums results across any of the links. If the tags are the same, it looks like the same link to us.
More Example Use Cases
Permanent link on your custom home page
-
source: minion-masters
-
medium: homepage
-
campaign: n/a
-
term: n/a
-
content: --sku488607666231443456
-
source: minion-masters
-
medium: email
-
campaign: my-newsletter
-
term: n/a
-
content: --sku488607666231443456
Giving a link to a streamer/influencer to promote a beta
-
source: twitch
-
medium: affiliate
-
campaign: beta-launch
-
term: n/a
-
content: --sku488607666231443456
Google Ads promoting a sale
-
source: google
-
medium: cpc
-
campaign: 2019-spring-sale
-
term: deck-building
-
content: --sku488607666231443456
Facebook Paid Campaign
-
source: facebook
-
medium: cpc
-
campaign: 2019-spring-sale
-
term: gamers-deck-building (i.e. custom audiences)
-
content: --sku488607666231443456
For a better understanding of the analytics definitions check out this guide here.