beehiiv's Powerful Attribution Engine Helps You Grow

Background

As part of our ongoing efforts to provide the most powerful tools to help creators grow, we recently released updates to our subscriber attribution tools within the Beehive platform.

You may not have seen them as they are deep within the platform, but these are some of the most valuable metrics for creators intent on growing their following.

Before we get into how to use these data, it's important to provide context as to where these updates are coming from and where they're leading.

From the beginning, it's been our goal here at beehive to provide the most functional platform for growing and scaling your newsletter. That begins with a clear understanding of where your audience finds you and where they're coming from when they subscribe to a publication. Over the next few months will be rolling out updates like allowing creators to segment audiences with greater granularity.

Updated beehiiv Attribution Framework:

channel: source / medium

Channel: The method by which a subscriber is added to a publication

Source: Where a subscriber came from before subscribing

Medium: How a subscriber came to a publication

How it Works

UTM parameters are commonly used to track links to understand how users arrive on a website. These are created by taking a URL, say beehiiv.com, and adding a “?” to the end followed by up to five standard UTM Parameters, each separated by a “&”:

• utm_source

• utm_medium

• utm_campaign

• utm_content

• utm_term

To learn more about how these are used, here’s an article that goes into deeper detail.

The important part is how these are used. If we wanted to tag a link to this blog’s subscription page from an organic post on Twitter, the URL might look like this:

Importantly, there is no required way to set UTM parameters, they can be set to anything, however, to provide some standardization, we’ve provided examples of common UTM sources and mediums at the end of this article.

It’s useful to note that for links that are not tagged explicitly with UTM parameters, our platform automatically collects data about the user’s visit and sets source and medium data based on the data we piece together about the visit.

Once this data is collected, we surface this information at the Subscriber level, which can be viewed by logging into your beehiiv account, navigating to Subscribers, and selecting a specific user.

Example 1

What you see in beehiiv:

Would be read as:

[email protected] was added to Publication XYZ from the publication’s beehiiv website (channel). They signed up after navigating to the publication by typing in the URL to their browser (source, medium.)

Example 2

What you see in beehiiv:

Would be read as:

[email protected] was added to Publication XYZ via a direct list upload (channel). They signed up after navigating to the publication by searching Google (source) and navigating to the publication organically (medium).

Example 3

What you see in beehiiv:

Would be read as:

[email protected] was added to Publication XYZ from the publication’s beehiiv website (channel). They found the sign-up after clicking on a link in their Twitter (source) feed (medium).

Example 4

What you see in beehiiv:

Would be read as:

[email protected] was added to Publication XYZ with an embed form (channel). They found the sign-up after clicking on a Facebook (source) ad (medium). In this case, the UTM parameters from the Facebook ad would have been manually set in the ad campaign to be utm_source=facebook and utm_medium=cpc

Common Channels, Sources, and Mediums

Channel / Description

Source / Description

Medium / Description