How can you get the most referral traffic from people sharing your online petitions, letters to Congress, and events? 

One way is through optimizing the action page and thanks page. You have your buttons to “Share on Facebook”, to “Share on Twitter” and to “Email Your Friends.”  You have your thanks language: “Thanks for signing our petition, your action helps to make the world a better place.” You have your Call to Action: “Can you share your this action with 3 friends and family members?”  Test the layout, the size and color of the buttons, and the language.

Then there is the “curiosity gap” in the share content - do you make the viewer want to click through to find out more about what you shared with your Facebook post and image?  Here on the right is an example of the curiosity gap in action from Upworthy.

These are the basics, and making sure that your action page and share content is well presented is important as each piece will lead to new supporters through social sharing.

But are you maximizing your exposure to new potential supporters?

More important than either of these variables is optimizing the share content itself.  The content that is posted to Facebook is what will drive new visitors to your site and has the greatest chance of resulting in exponential growth.   On Facebook, this means testing different content for the share post - the post title, image, and description associated with the page you are asking supporters to share.  By testing this content, you are able to take the guesswork out of the process and scientifically prove what works best for driving new sign-ups.

While this has seemed like a challenge that requires some expensive new tool to tackle, it’s actually not that difficult to test.  And you can do it on a low budget.

Here is how to test the most important thing that you should be doing on your share pages to make sure you are getting the most out of your supporters:

Setting up the Action Pages:

1. Create your action or donate page in your advocacy tool [Salsa, Nationbuilder, BSD, Action Kit, etc.]

2. Duplicate it

3. For each of the duplicates, change out the custom share content with a separate share image, share title, and share description for Facebook, Twitter, email, and any other networks you use.  For each page variation try to create a consistent message for each medium, and don’t forget to take advantage of the curiosity gap.

4. [Optional, but not required] If you can set the URL of the page that is shared on your thanks page, then you should use Google’s URL Builder tool to be able to track referrals from your share button. Otherwise you won’t know for sure that users are coming from the share page, just that they are going to a specific action page.

Setting up the Email Blasts

1. Draft your email blast content and get it set up in your email blast tool.

2. Duplicate it [You can use the A/B testing tool if your email tool has one to create two or more test groups].  If your list is big enough, you can test with small portions of the list to find the winning share content.

3. Update the links in your test emails.  Each email should send users to a different action page.

4. Send the test emails and monitor your Google Analytics to see which page is getting the most referral traffic from Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.  

Find the Best Share Content

1. Based on which share content is driving the most referrals to your site, send that email and action page to the rest of your email list and share it on your own Facebook Page.

Things to consider about testing share content:
 

You can use this model to test variations in the action language also, but if you haven’t done it before we recommend testing the share content variations first as this is what potential supporters will see. Taking advantage of the curiosity gap and testing a variety of different text and image content that will prompt users to click on your content can be highly successful in driving traffic.

Make sure that your Google Analytics is set up on your advocacy tool action and thanks pages, if not you likely won’t be able to measure site traffic or the referral source as well. If you have the ability to set custom links for the share page, certainly put it to good use! However, this approach can work even without that ability.  
 

Looking at the Results in Google Analytics:

If you are able to use custom links and Google’s URL Builder, here is how you can see the results:

1. Build the custom URL with the URL Builder setting the following variables:

   1. Source

   2. Medium

   3. Campaign

2. Look under Acquisition > Campaigns in Google Analytics

3. Add the secondary dimension for Source or Medium based on your naming conventions

4. Look at which link is sending the most referral traffic

If your share links are automatically generated by your advocacy tool, here is how to see which page is driving the most referral traffic:

• In Google Analytics go to Acquisition > All Referrals

• Filter to just display the action pages you are testing

• Add Source as the Secondary Dimension in order to see where the share language is working most effectively, eg. Facebook, Twitter, or “direct” for email.

Through these tools, you will be able to track visitors coming from Facebook to each of the action pages, but will not be able to differentiate whether the original source of the referral was the share page, or if someone just shared the link to the action page.

Let us know if you have any questions, and how your tests go in the comments!

Making it Easier to Test Share Content

If you are finding that the variations on your share content are driving more referral traffic once tested and optimized, you might want to check out ShareProgress to see if their tools could be valuable for you. Or if you want the ability to customize the social share content on your action pages and website, let us know and we can help you get it set up on your site or action pages.