Traffic attribution survey template: know the real story behind the click

How do people really find your website?

“Google,” says your analytics dashboard. Great. But…how did they end up on Google in the first place?

Maybe a colleague mentioned you in passing. Maybe they caught your product in a newsletter, saw your CEO on LinkedIn, or stumbled across your webinar during a late-night scroll. The truth is, most traffic stories start before the search bar—and traditional analytics just can’t tell you that.

That’s where a traffic attribution survey comes in. It helps you uncover the real paths users take to get to your site—the whispers, the shares, the curious clicks. With just a few clicks, you can start collecting honest answers straight from your audience. No guesswork. No setup. Just clear insight into what’s actually driving discovery.

With this survey, you'll learn:

1. Where your audience came from

2. How effective your acquisition channels are

3. Why visitors chose to visit your website

4. Whether users found what they wanted on your site

Better understand your visitors

No 2 visitors to your site are the same. Just because both may have come from a Google search it doesn’t mean they’re after the same thing. To optimize your site and make it more effective, you need to understand where your traffic really came from. 

The folks at Made.com (an ecommerce and retail store for furniture) understand this brilliantly. 

On Made.com, the showroom page guides prospective buyers through their choice of products with a color-picker functionality. Shortly after seeing the page, people are presented with a question that investigates: “How did you hear about this showroom?”

This is a question you’ll find in the traffic attribution survey template. It’s great because the radio button only allows one answer. With this insight, you could build a quantitative model of your traffic sources and weigh elements such as word-of-mouth or offline advertising that can’t be easily measured through standard analytics tools. And importantly, you’ll finally be able to understand where visitors come from. 

To replicate what Made.com learned, use Contentsquare’s traffic attribution survey template available in our template gallery. It comes packed with all the questions Made.com used. What’s more, the template is fully customizable, meaning you can change the question order, add your own questions, and tweak the design.

Easily locate the traffic attribution survey in Contentsquare’s template gallery

💡Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Surveys tool lets you fully customize your surveys to make them your own. You can

• Tweak each question in the template or add your own

• Change the color scheme (more colors available on our growth plan)

• Pick between full-screen, pop-up, or external link surveys

Choose the perfect type of survey that best fits your needs with Contentsquare’s Surveys tool

3 questions you’ll be able to answer

Here are the 3 questions you’ll be able to answer after launching a successful traffic attribution survey:

1. Are your acquisition channels effective?

Attributing traffic to different acquisition channels is never easy. In fact, it’s often harmful, causing you to overinvest in easy-to-track channels (usually paid ads) and underinvest in hard-to-track channels (usually brand building). To really understand which channels are most effective, you need to ask a portion of visitors where they heard of you. This traffic attribution survey template does just that. 

2. What are your visitors looking for? 

As your site gets larger, understanding what visitors want gets harder and harder. You have mobile vs. desktop. Different languages. First-time visitors and loyal customers. All these different groups of people may want different things. To better understand what each of them needs, you can use this traffic attribution survey template. Not only does it ask what visitors want, but it also lets you segment responses by different factors, so you can learn if mobile visitors want the same things as desktop users.

3. Is anything missing on your site?

There’s nothing worse than spending months designing a new page only to see visitors bounce within seconds. Clearly, the page is missing something, but what is it? This traffic attribution template helps you discover just that. By asking visitors if anything is missing, you’ll learn if there’s any important information that you need to add.

An example of a Contentsquare traffic attribution survey

How to set up a traffic attribution survey with Contentsquare in seconds

Getting started with Contentsquare’s traffic attribution survey is fast and easy. 

1. Navigate to Surveys in Contentsquare from the left-hand menu

2. Click ‘New Survey’ in the upper-right corner

3. Choose to start from scratch or use one of 40+ templates—like the traffic attribution template—then customize it as needed

Once set up, your survey is ready to send to customers and start gathering valuable insights.

📌 Reminder: ensure the Contentsquare tag is installed on your site. This tracking code allows you to host the survey live on your site rather than via an external URL. This might be useful if you want to show the traffic attribution survey to users on a certain page. It’ll also mean you’ll be able to access all of Contentsquare’s existing features.

Don’t worry, installing the tag won’t slow your website down. And it doesn’t cost you anything (our free plans are free forever). To set up your full Contentsquare account and install the tag, follow these steps, or simply use the Contentsquare and Google Tag Manager integration.

FAQs about the traffic attribution survey template