This guide on Auditing Your Drift Account is for those who are familiar with the Drift platform, understand the basics of how Drift works, and have the responsibility of making revisions or recommendations based on the current state of their Drift account. This document excludes best practices relating to revenue reporting as revenue reporting is completely relative to your business.

Permissions Requirement: You will need to be an admin on the Drift account to review all reports we’ll go through in this document. Additionally, some reports visibility in your account will depend on your current plan, however, note will be made throughout this document on when reports require a certain plan level.

In this article, we'll cover:

• High Level Overview
• Influenced by Drift
• Playbook Reporting
• Conversation Flow Report
• Conversations
• Site Coverage
• Routed Chats

High Level Overview

Like videos? Here’s a 2 minute video running through this: https://video.drift.com/v/ab4SivT4kGw/

First, we’ll begin with a high level overview of your account performance so we can easily spot any issues or trends when reviewing the last 30 days in comparison to the previous 30 days.

In order to view this: 

1. Click the Drift icon on your navigation bar to go to your reports.
2. Next, ensure you have the correct period of time selected in the Filter dashboard dropdown (we suggest 30 days)
3. Make sure you’ve set up your success metrics. For a reference point on metrics, check out this blog post over on Drift.com

Going through each report overview separately, we’ll begin with the Drift overview.

Within this report, you’ll find:

1. The number of conversations
2. The emails captured both from any default email capture settings and also from email capture questions in playbooks
3. CQLs (Conversation Qualified Leads) that have occurred within your account over the last 30 days.
4. A delta icon which indicates and showcases the percent increase or decrease when compared to the previous 30 day period. 

Influenced by Drift

Note: In order to have this report you’ll need an active Salesforce account that has been connected to Drift.

This report showcases:

1. The count of opportunities influenced by or sourced from Drift in the last 30 days
2. The dollar amount of pipeline influenced or sourced from Drift within the last 30 days
3. The close-won pipeline influenced or sourced from Drift within the last 30 days.
4. A delta icon and percent that indicates the increase or decrease in metrics when compared to the previous 30 day cycle.

What’s the difference between Influenced and Sourced Opportunities?

A sourced opportunity is any opportunity that was created up to 90 days after the primary contact for that opportunity had a conversation in Drift. Sourced opportunities are a subset of influenced and will be shown together in the high level report displayed above. 

To review each report individually:

1. Click Reports on your navigation bar.
2. Click Overview
3. Click Influenced or Sourced

Moving forward, we’ll now cover the meetings report.

This report is broken down into two reviews, a historical chart that compares the last 30 days to the previous cycle on a day-by-day basis. On the right, is a breakdown of teammates booking the most meetings.

 

What action(s) would I take based on this report?

Meetings have many variables. This report can help you discover who is the most successful Drift user within your organization if meetings are a high priority metrics in your organization.

Finishing up the high level overview, we’ll review Conversations Reporting.

To access conversation reporting:

1. Click the Drift icon on your navigation bar to go to your reports.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the reporting screen to find the reporting charts (As seen below)

Similar to the meetings report this is broken down into two reviews:

• On the left, a historical chart of your conversations on a day-by-day basis highlighted in a darker green coloration and the previous period in a lighter green coloration.
• On the right side, you’ll find a graphic depicting the average conversations by time of day. The darker the color, the more conversations that average during that day and time.

There are a lot of chats coming in over the weekend but no one staffed, what’s a best practice?

This is what bots are for.  Ensure you have an offline bot for weekends that helps customers and books meetings for your sales team.  If you have built a playbook that you'd like to use as an offline bot, all you need to do is set the targeting of the bot for when Drift is offline.  You can do this by going to:

1. Playbooks
2. Select your playbook
3. Under targeting select Visitors who match the following conditions and use the conditional drop downs to seen in the screen shot below.

You can also use Conditional Branching in the builder of your playbooks to book meetings when everyone is offline.  To do this:

1. Go to Playbooks 
2. Click Chat Playbooks
3. Select your playbook
4. Click the Bot flow tab
5. Click the plus sign in the bot flow and select Conditional branching
6. Select Drift Status is Offline as your condition, and in the new offline branch add the Book a meeting skill

For additional info on conditional branching, you can check out this lesson from Drift Insider on Offline Targeting for more detailed instructions.

Playbook Reporting

Auditing playbooks is done on a playbook-by-playbook basis which allows you to investigate specific adjustments which may benefit the performance of your playbook.

Overview

To review your playbook reporting:

1. Navigate to Reports
2. Under Playbooks click Chat Playbooks

This page will give you a high level overview of playbooks and allow you to sort them by Sends, Conversations, Emails captured, or Meetings booked. Learn more about these metrics here.

⚡️ Benchmark: 2% Conversation Rate.

When we’re looking at your overview reporting for playbooks we’ll want to ask a few questions:

Is everyone seeing the same experience? 

An example of this would be having a "catch all" and "retargeting playbook" being the top two active playbooks as those are both closely the same experience.

• Resolution: Invest in developing a Conversational Marketing Strategy and create unique conversational experiences across impactful pages on your site.  You can learn more about this here.

Can you layer on new experiences?

Look at your top viewed pages (by either leveraging Site Coverage or Google Analytics) to see if there are any pages you can create a unique playbook that a large percentage of your traffic will see.

You would typically look to do this due to the fact that optimizing your homepage/catch all/retargeting playbook is less effective in the long run than it would be to create new unique experiences personalized to the page or buyer stage a visitor is at.

Performance

You can go more in-depth and find actionable insights from you playbooks by clicking the playbook from the Playbook Chat report.  (Reports > Playbooks > Chat)

 

First, it's important to understand what you're looking at.  Several aspects of this screen to know:

• You should ensure your time period in the upper right corner is accurate, you can select between 7 days, 30 days, and 3 months.
• In the table below the high-level metrics, you’ll see an additional time period dropdown on the the left hand side which allows you to toggle between viewing results on a by day, week, or month basis. This by day, week, or month dropdown will also impact what is exported when you click Export CSV button on the right hand side.

Circling back to the high-level metrics, this will show you how the funnel of this playbook is looking, although, they’re shown vertically in this instance you can imagine them like this:

 

Conversation Flow Report

Next, we’ll move into reviewing the Conversation Flow report, (we’ll skip over People and Conversations in this case since, for more information on what to look for in the People and Conversations report, review this video.)

To access the Conversation Flow report:

1. Click reports
2. Select Chat (under playbooks)
3. Select the Conversation Flow tab

Within the Conversation Flow tab, we can see where drop-off is occurring, this helps in optimizing your playbook to ensure you’re converting the highest level of visitors.

 

Keep in mind that, unless this is a Drift Link playbook, your first message’s drop-off is expected to be high. The initial message’s drop-off signifies the number of people that saw the bot preview or clicked open the widget and did not engage with the bot further.

You can improve this number by improving your bot’s hook question, here’s our book of hooks as a resource.  Two things to note:

• Make sure your hook is under 100 characters so visitors are seeing the entire hook.
• Make sure your hook is in question format to provoke the visitor to respond.

(Advanced Plan and Above) Consider running an A/B test on your hook in an effort to improve conversions.

When optimizing your bot’s hook consider leveraging:

• Value proposition
• Social proof (i.e., we helped Acme save $$, want to see how we can help you?)
• Data (i.e., ready to save 80% on…)
• Model after your sales team’s best performing subject lines (i.e. Emails with the highest Open/Meeting rate)
• Model after your marketing team’s best performing email CTAs
• Model after your marketing team’s best performing ad copy
• Reference our Book of Hooks!

As you navigate through this report, you’ll want to be looking for non-essential questions that are causing drop-off within the conversation’s flow.  An example of this would be asking questions that don’t qualify/disqualify the lead.

Additionally, it’s helpful to differentiate questions based on if your team is offline or online. Meaning, if the team is offline it may be more necessary to collect additional context, however, if they’re online it’s best to allow a human to carry the conversation after asking one-to-two questions which determine if the lead is qualified to chat with sales.

Additionally, the timing of the question may be a cause of drop-off, make sure when you’re asking a question:

• The visitor has expressed interest
• The visitor understands the benefit of giving you this information

Conversations

Your conversations report helps you further understand the performance of your team who are handling the chats once they have been routed to a human.

To access this info:

1. Click Reports
2. Select Chat overview (under conversations)

We suggest selecting the filter icon on the right hand side and selecting Participant Types and selecting Bot + Teammate.  This will allow you to view conversations where a human was involved.

Within this report you’ll gain insight into:

• How many conversations your team is taking on
• The average number of conversations by time or day
• The average length of those conversations

To see reporting on when a specific team is becoming involved:

1. Click Filter on the right hand side.
2. Select Team/is/select the team(s) you’d like to view in the reports.

Meetings

Within the meetings booked report we’ll see how many meetings are being booked over time, who is booking the most, and the source of those meetings.

To access the meetings report:

1. Click Reports
2. Select Meetings (under conversations)

CSMs look through this report to see the legitimacy of the meeting bookers, this is also a helpful time to ask your sales team how meetings booked through Drift are going.  If legitimacy or qualification is of concern, this is a good time to look into when you’re booking a meeting within a playbook and ensure before you permit that booking you’ve properly qualified the prospect.

Even if you don’t have specific qualification questions, asking questions like “where in the buying process are you?” or "how soon are you looking to commit" is helpful when routing prospects to or away from the ability to book a meeting.

Need help qualifying? Here’s Drift’s guide to How To Use Conversational Marketing To Fix Your Lead Quality Problems.

Site Coverage

Your site coverage report is helpful in, at a glance, showing you what percentage of your site visitors are seeing your Drift playbooks in action.

1. Click Reports
2. Select Site Coverage (under Playbooks)

Note: You'll want to ensure Drift is installed globally on your website, otherwise, this report may be inaccurate.

 

Benchmark: 80%+ Site Visitors Shown a Playbook

• Think of your site coverage as the top of your funnel. The wider the net you cast (aka showing more site visitors a playbook) the bigger impact you will have on the bottom of your funnel metrics - such as lead captures, meetings booked and ultimately revenue impacted. Due to this, we strive for a 80% site coverage percentage.

Cause for Concern: < 50% Site Visitors Shown a Playbook

• Unless there is a methodic reason for having a reduced number of visitors seeing playbooks, too low of site coverage can damage the ROI potential you see from Drift due to the fact Drift won’t have a high number of opportunities to enable that conversation for your team.

Shouldn’t I strive for 100% site coverage?

• We don’t see 100% as a realistic goal due to the fact that some may never see Drift due to bounce rate, there will be careers pages you won’t want to have Drift on, and a variety of other reasons.

If you're looking for more details on how CSMs review the site coverage report, check out this quick video

When reviewing this report, we’ll look at the tabs for URL or Top Level Path to see what pages on your website have the most opportunities for either:

• (a) Introducing a new playbook (if they don’t have one targeting that page) or,
• (b) Creating a unique experience for this specific page. We’ll look to your top 5-10 pages and consider building unique experiences for those if they’ll be impactful.

Keep in mind: 2% is the benchmark for those who convert from Drift Sends to a Conversation so make sure when you’re building a playbook for a specific page that the page itself has enough traffic to deliver return on that investment.

Routed Chats

This report gives us insight into how the team responsible for handling chats is performing once a chat has been routed to them.  To view team performance report:

1. Click Reports
2. Select Routed chats (under Conversations)

Benchmark: Reply time of < 60 seconds

• Prospects who engage with your playbooks looking to chat are typically looking for chatting NOW.  Ao once your wait time goes over a minute, it no longer feels like that instant human connection. We’ve seen that after 5 minutes prospects engagement decreases by 10x.

When looking to improve any of the metrics on this page consider two aspects:

1. Team enablement:  Is your sales team trained well enough on how to use Drift and do they have the correct settings? 

2. Routing fallback:  Are your routing rules and routing fallback settings correctly configured and routing to the correct teammates?  If needed, it may help to review our help doc on Drift Routing Fallbacks and Routing Rules to ensure your Drift account is up-to-date.

Wrapping up:

We hope this guide has been informative.  If you need additional clarifications or suggestions, or need any help with anything mentioned in this article, feel free to reach out to your CSM at any time.