Summary
In the Earnings tab of your course, you'll see a chart that shows how students first discovered your course.
We show when a student first learned about your course through: your marketing efforts external to Maven (your social posts, newsletters), your marketing efforts through Maven's tools (lead magnets, affiliate tracking), the Maven marketplace (Maven.com, course recommendations), and Maven's marketing efforts (emails, social media, paid ads). We also show if students were imported by you from an external list.
For some students, we don't have data on how they learned about your course. We mark these as "untracked.” We encourage you to use UTMs to better track your marketing, so you can see which efforts to invest more in.
Attribution Categories
To help you improve your marketing efforts, we display a breakdown of how students first discovered your course. This data is shown in your Earnings tab and categorized into the following attribution categories:
Instructor marketing. This includes your social media posts, your paid advertising campaigns, your newsletters, or anywhere you share a trackable link. Students who search for your name or course on any search engine are also included in this category.
Instructor marketing through Maven. This includes Maven’s lead magnet tool, the course interest survey, affiliate links you've created through Maven’s platform, and alumni share links you’ve sent using our email broadcast tool.
Maven marketing. This includes emails we send to the Maven email list, Maven's paid advertising campaigns, newsletter sponsorships, and social media posts.
Instructor uploaded. This includes students you imported into Maven (e.g. emails you collected from webinars that you ran outside of Maven, your newsletter subscriber list, or students you enrolled manually).
Untracked. Because of ad blockers and browser privacy settings, we sometimes have no data on how students discovered your course. We're working to improve the data accuracy for all students, and we encourage you to use UTMs to better track your marketing, so you can see which efforts to dig deeper on.
For now, we only show attribution for paid enrollments. Free enrollments are not counted or considered in the percentages for each category.
Attribution Model
To determine a student’s category, we look at their activity on our site prior to discovering your course using Amplitude, our user analytics platform. Amplitude provides us with referrer and UTM data that help us inform where the student came from. We look for the student’s first interaction with your course, i.e. their first course touchpoint. Oftentimes, this will be when they view your course landing page for the first time. Your student’s first course touchpoint and their activity leading up to it provide us with an understanding of how your students discovered your course. UTM and referrer data associated with the first course touchpoint give us the best information to determine where a student came from. Maven implements UTM tracking on all of our marketing efforts to better understand our marketing effectiveness in bringing students to your course.
When no UTM or referrer data is found, we examine where the first course touchpoint occurred. Sometimes this could be through the marketplace, where a student discovers and clicks on your course while browsing our course catalog. Another example of this touchpoint could be opening and clicking to your course landing page from our marketing emails.
Improving “untracked”
Our model depends heavily on user activity data, and with more ad-blocking technology and tools that prevent user tracking, it is difficult to draw conclusions when the data is lacking or incomplete. Sometimes, we see students viewing a course landing page for the first time with no data that our model can draw conclusions from. In these scenarios, we place the student in the “untracked” category.
This category can be improved by implementing better tracking across all marketing efforts. Maven implements UTM tracking on our course links, which has significantly improved our ability to track students who engage with our marketing campaigns. We encourage you to do the same by attaching UTMs anytime you share a link to your course. Maven has built an easy way for you to share your landing page with a UTM attached; just click the "share" button in the upper right corner of your page! we highly recommend using this link when you share your course, so we can better identify your marketing efforts and improve your data.
Model Accuracy
Our team evaluated how accurately our model is able to correctly place students in the right attribution categories. We manually checked a sample of our attribution category results, which allowed us to validate our model and pushed us to implement more accurate data tracking measures that give us further confidence in our model.
Out of 586 attribution results, our first course touchpoint model is 94% accurate, correctly placing students in their attribution category. Some of the errors were due to older or incomplete data that we’ve fixed and addressed going forward. By nature, our model focuses on how the student first engaged with your course, and doesn’t take into account whether they engaged with Maven’s platform, marketing efforts, or other courses prior to landing on your course.
If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected].
FAQs
What other attribution models did you consider?
Previously, we explored a first touch model that looks at how a student first landed on Maven. Early on, this model performed well, as the majority of our students were new to Maven. However, as our platform matured and our marketplace presence grew with an increasing % of students taking multiple courses, our old model overly favored Maven’s platform and undervalued instructor marketing efforts.
Updating our model to a first course touchpoint model allows us to focus on the goal that our attribution model aims to deliver: how a student first discovered your course.
Why are some students labeled as “untracked”?
Because of ad blockers and browser privacy settings, we sometimes have no data on how students discovered your course. These students are categorized as “untracked.” We encourage you to use UTMs anytime you share a link to your course, so we can better identify your marketing efforts and improve our attribution data.
How can I better leverage Maven’s tooling to drive enrollments?
We recommend using the tools designed to help you build your waitlist, like the course interest survey, lead magnet feature, and affiliate links. Once you've built a waitlist, you'll use Maven's email tools, like the cohort launch campaign and other automated email sequences to convert your leads into enrollments..
How can I increase my course presence in the Maven marketplace?
Once your course is listed on Maven.com, students can discover your course in our marketplace. Your course will move higher in its category as you approach your course start date. Students are looking for courses that have rigorous course outcomes and are directly relevant to them. Be sure your course title is specific and you have a narrowed target student.
Your course may be considered for inclusion in our weekly emails to students if it's a top trending course relative to other courses starting soon.
Do you show attribution for free enrollments?
For now, we only show attribution for paid enrollments. Free enrollments are not counted or considered in the percentages for each category.