Understanding the Overall Performance Report

Programme Reporting includes a summary page showing all of your key metrics at a glance. However, the metrics on that summary page aren’t easy to edit or customise, so most people go straight to the Overall Performance page instead, which offers more control over what you see. On this page you have:

• A campaign selector, so you can view all campaigns together or filter down to one (for example, if a merchant runs separate UK, France, and Spain campaigns)
• A date picker, with preset windows or the option to enter a custom date range
• The ability to add a comparison to any metric, either against the prior year or the prior period (the equivalent number of days immediately before your selected window)
• A metric selector, so you can add or remove metrics from the default view

Every metric also has a hover definition. Some of these definitions are more useful than others, which is where this article comes in. For a full reference of every metric tracked across the referral funnel, see the Referral Metrics Glossary.

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The Referral Funnel: End to End

The most useful way to read these metrics is end to end, as a funnel: each metric represents a stage further along the referral journey, from a customer seeing a referral offer through to a new customer completing their first order. A few of these are worth explaining further.

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Unique Impressions vs Impressions

Impressions and unique impressions are similar, but impressions are not deduplicated. If a customer refreshes the page showing the referral popup three times, that counts as four impressions but only one unique impression. Because unique impressions ties activity to unique sessions rather than counting every page load, it’s the more reliable of the two metrics to use.

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Enrolled Customers vs Actively Enrolled Customers

At the post-purchase point, Mention Me automatically captures a customer’s name and email address and registers them for referral without any action from the customer. This is called a silent enrolment. Enrolled Customers is the combined total of:

• Customers who were silently enrolled at post-purchase
• Customers who actively enrolled, either by clicking through the post-purchase overlay or by manually registering on a landing page or dashboard

Actively Enrolled Customers counts only the second group: customers who have shown some level of engagement with the programme, rather than simply having a referral offer appear in front of them. Comparing the two numbers is useful. If Enrolled Customers is far higher than Actively Enrolled Customers, it tells you that most customers have been registered but haven’t yet meaningfully engaged with the programme. Looking at Clicks alongside Customers Who Shared can also be revealing: roughly three clicks per share suggests a healthy amount of engagement with each share, though an unusually high ratio can also indicate that referral links are being posted somewhere public, such as a voucher code forum, rather than shared one-to-one.

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Revenue Metrics

The revenue metrics build on top of the funnel to show the financial impact of referral. Total Referral Revenue is the headline figure typically shared with a client: for example, “over the last 30 days, Mention Me generated you £17,000, made up of £5,000 from new customer revenue, £12,000 from referees’ subsequent orders, and a small amount from rewarded referrers.” At onboarding, clients are asked to share order values net of discounts and VAT, so revenue metrics should reflect revenue before discount. In practice, clients don’t always set this up correctly on their side. Revenue From Rewarded Referrers has no direct link to the referrer’s reward itself - it simply measures whatever the referrer spent within 45 days of receiving it. For clients whose referrer reward is a small, fixed-value gift card (for example, a £20 Amazon voucher from an insurer), this metric may not be especially meaningful, since the reward isn’t tied to a purchase.

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Conversion Metrics

Conversion metrics express the funnel above as ratios. Share Rate is Customers Who Shared as a percentage of Enrolled Customers. For example, a merchant with 35,000 enrolled customers and 1,600 who shared has a share rate of roughly 5%. Purchase Rate is Referee First Orders as a percentage of shares. For example, a merchant generating 100 new customers from 1,600 shares has a purchase rate of roughly 6%. Conversion Rate is Referee First Orders as a percentage of Enrolled Customers, showing overall drop-off across the whole journey. Share Rate and Conversion Rate are both calculated from total Enrolled Customers, not from Actively Enrolled Customers. This is deliberate: both metrics are meant to show, of everyone who could share because they’ve been enrolled, how many actually did. Measuring from Actively Enrolled Customers alone would inflate the picture, since customers in that group have already shown intent to engage. As a rough guide:

• A Share Rate of around 5% is acceptable; 10% is better
• A Purchase Rate of 20-30% is typical for a healthy programme
• A Conversion Rate of around 1% is a reasonable expectation

If Purchase Rate is low, the issue is more likely to sit on the referee’s side of the journey than the referrer’s, since Share Rate is about the referrer and Purchase Rate is about the referee. This is a useful place to focus when planning an A/B test. The reporting platform’s Benchmarking section covers this in more detail - see Understanding Referral Intelligence Benchmarks.

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Average Order Value

New Customer AOV is the average value of a referee’s first order - Revenue From New Customers divided by the number of new referred customers. Non-Referred Customer AOV is the average order value of orders that weren’t placed as a result of referral. Comparing the two is a useful story to tell a client, even when referral volumes are modest. If New Customer AOV is consistently higher than Non-Referred Customer AOV, it shows that the customers referral is generating spend more, on average, than the merchant’s other customers.

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The Promotion Points Report

Alongside Overall Performance, the Promotion Points report shows where in the referral funnel activity is happening, broken down by touchpoint - for example, post-purchase, a banner in the account area, or a dedicated landing page. Touchpoints are tracked using situation parameters on referral URLs - see Promotion Points & Situation Parameters for how these are set up. This report is useful for spotting imbalance. If the large majority of impressions (for example, 96%) are happening at a single touchpoint such as post-purchase, that suggests referral isn’t being promoted enough elsewhere - in emails, on dedicated pages, or in other places on the site. Talking about referral in more places is generally a good sign. It’s also worth checking where new customers are actually coming from, not just impressions. A touchpoint that isn’t promoted heavily, such as an account-area banner or a landing page, can still contribute a disproportionate share of new customers relative to how little it’s used, which is a signal that it’s worth investing in further. As a rough guide, if post-purchase accounts for 60% or less of new customers generated through referral, that’s a good sign: it means the other 40% or more is coming from other touchpoints, which shows referral is being promoted well across the site.

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See Also