How will Google Analytics 4 affect your funnel?

For most B2B marketers, Google Analytics (GA) is a foundational part of their stack. Google’s long-running web analytics platform emphasizes universal compatibility, meaning it often serves as the connective tissue between different elements and software applications you use in your marketing. Most business and marketing tools incorporate Google Analytics. With the continued implementation of Google Analytics 4, the platform has leaped forward in critical areas.

Announced in late 2020, Google Analytics 4 is one of the most significant upgrades the platform has seen since its launch over 15 years ago. You might have already migrated your data to this new version, but if you haven’t, the deadline is coming up quickly. On July 1, 2023, Universal Analytics properties used by older versions of GA will stop processing new data. Depending on your settings, Google may automatically create a new instance of your old profile into the new GA4 platform. If possible, try to get ahead of this deadline and migrate your profiles before Google does it for you.

This article will help you understand some of the most important new features in Google Analytics 4, how they differ from previous versions, and how this could impact how you use GA throughout your funnels.

What Are the Biggest Changes in Google Analytics 4?

The overall mission of GA hasn’t changed: it’s designed to help website owners and marketers better understand the way visitors interact with digital properties. Google has changed the way that its platform understands and measures these interactions in a few key ways:

  •  More flexible events. The system for gathering data (or “hits,” as Google calls it) is much broader in GA4. It’s derived from the Firebase Analytics platform, which Google developed for mobile devices and apps. In the updated version, you can set custom events based on almost any action or event you want instead of limiting yourself to Google’s predetermined event categories.
  • Support for apps and other websites. The new version of Google Analytics can track user data on external apps and social media platforms. It’s especially beneficial to apps built with Firebase SDK, Google’s suite of app development tools and platforms to help developers and engineers streamline products.
  • New visual dashboard. Google has streamlined the main GA dashboard’s interface and visual aesthetic, offering a more concise set of options and a cleaner main page. There are fewer options on the left-hand navigation menu and a less boxy design. Google has also implemented a tab-based navigation system that many users will find more intuitive.

New Reporting Tools

As most experienced marketers know, the data you gather is only valuable if you can measure and understand it. This is typically done by taking it from the platform on which it was collected and contextualizing it into a report or similar document. Google Analytics always had powerful reporting tools, but GA4 ups the ante by adding a few new features.

Besides the new cross-platform reporting tools mentioned above, GA4 offers more sophisticated attribution models than the last version. That means deeper insights into where leads come from and which sources provide the most qualified prospects. Better attribution can lead to better marketing and less wasteful spending on channels that don’t produce the same results.

Google Analytics always had powerful reporting tools, but GA4 ups the ante by adding a few new features. Click To Tweet

Finally, Google’s upgraded platform also incorporates machine learning, the fundamental principle behind the vast artificial intelligence trend that seems to be sweeping every industry. This can be used for predictive recommendations about optimizing your site or app and protection from spam or bots that may be generating a high level of suspicious traffic. Machine learning can also track the habits and patterns of specific users and help you develop protocols for serving preferred content to the groups that want to see them.

These tools are great for both business administrators and marketers responsible for explaining their work results to clients. Better reporting means more efficient use of the data you create and access in Google Analytics.

Cross-Platform Support

Google understands that the internet is a much different place than it was in the late-2000s when Google Analytics first rose to prominence. Today’s web is fragmented – people use several different apps or social media networks to find what they’re after, whether information, entertainment, or connection with others.

That’s why one of the key hallmarks of GA4 is expanding the places where Google lets you track user data. With GA4, you can gather data from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to help you measure significant trends and patterns related to your business and its presence on third-party websites. You can imagine how helpful it might be to include social media data and information about your funnel’s different websites.

Compatibility with social media is also powerful because of GA4’s attribution technology. You can attribute leads from specific social media networks, which can be used to tweak your campaign and investment. You can also include GA4 attribution as a component of a larger lead-scoring formula to grade new opportunities across the company.

Best of all, if you’re already using a tool for attribution – perhaps a CRM like Salesforce or a marketing automation platform like HubSpot – you can still connect your Google Analytics account to the most popular types of lead tracking and marketing analytics software.

Final Thoughts on How Google Analytics 4 Impacts Your Funnels

Most marketers who have been on the job for a considerable time have some experience working with Google Analytics or at least have worked alongside others who know the platform well. For the better part of two decades, it’s been a pivotal arrow in the quiver of marketers and website administrators looking to get a sense of where their traffic is coming from, how people interact with their pages, and what the ideal prospect looks like.

With their new update that will sunset older versions this upcoming July 1, Google has widened the scope of data available to users and increased the number of ways to measure user interactions on their websites. From a business perspective, these updates will lead to marketers and businesses getting an even firmer grasp of their ideal clients, letting them develop more customized solutions that address their most pressing problems.

You may still have time before the deadline, but it’s always better to be prepared well. If you haven’t already made the jump and are looking for help converting your Universal Analytics account to Google Analytics 4, want to set up a new campaign, or are simply struggling to gain meaningful business insights from Google Analytics or any other platform for gathering data about user interactions with your web presence, we may be able to help.

The team at FunnelEnvy has many years of collective experience working with consumer and business software companies across all kinds of industries, from healthcare to real estate. To find out more about whether or not we can help and get additional details about our pricing, fill out this short quiz.

By |2023-05-22T08:32:12-07:00May 29th, 2023|Analytics|0 Comments
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3 Examples of Helpful A/B Tests and Why They Work

A/B testing is a powerful tool for B2B marketers and considered a staple of the toolbox for improving a campaign. Marketing teams in every industry with every type of product and service can use A/B testing to figure out which option in a campaign works. 

The fact that you must conduct A/B testing in a specific method to attain success doesn’t get discussed as regularly. A/B testing done the wrong way can cause a lot of wasted time and effort for your team. Even if you generate sufficient data from the tests, it won’t be as effective as with proper methodology.

To help you better handle your A/B testing, we provide three examples of some of the most crucial A/B tests you can perform in many different contexts. Remember: the advice here is general, so you’ll need to think about how to apply it to your specific funnel.

Landing Pages With a High Bounce Rate

Every experienced marketer knows the dreadful, pit-of-your-stomach feeling you get when you spend lots of time and resources building up what you think is a great landing page for your funnel, only to find that it flops with very little engagement and conversions. 

You likely have a few landing pages already in mind that need to be tweaked and improved. If not, an excellent way to get started with this type of A/B test is to explore your analytics platform to identify which pages need the most improvement.

Here are a few other tips for landing page testing:

  • Have a predetermined length in mind. You don’t want to have one A/B test running for a week, another for a month, and another for just a few days – this distorts your data and dilutes the quality of the tests’ results.
  • Don’t make traffic splits equal. You should start by giving the existing landing page a larger share of site traffic, then slowly increase it. Do this to account for the potential negatives of incorporating any new idea onto a page.
      
  • Consider predictive traffic. In this blog, we’ve previously explored some of the relative benefits and drawbacks of using A/B tests compared to predictive bandits, which use machine learning models to determine the optimal version of your site to deliver to users. The most significant benefit of this approach is that it avoids the “one-size-fits-all” problem with A/B testing.

Important Form Page for your Funnel

You can apply form pages in several different ways within your funnel, for everything from a critical conversion step to a basic logistics element like booking a video call. With this in mind, it’s important to think carefully about which form you decide to A/B test.

A seemingly-minor form page setup improperly can have just as much of a negative impact as a final form directly tied to conversions. Click To Tweet

That doesn’t mean, however, that you should only test critical funnels directly linked to the main conversions you’re tracking. A seemingly-minor form page setup improperly can have just as much of a negative impact as a final form directly tied to conversions.

For example, imagine a well-designed form with dynamic fields, progress indicators, and other staples that should convert properly. However, when a user reaches the last step or segment – or even the confirmation page – there’s an element that causes users to lose confidence and fail to complete the subsequent steps to get them down the funnel.

That’s why we recommend considering A/B tests for even the smallest elements when it comes to forms. Form field length, field titles, progress bars, button text – even the form’s primary and secondary colors can impact how people view your forms. 

It may not seem significant, but as is the case with many other types of A/B testing, a tiny change can significantly impact conversion rates.

Email Subject Lines

Almost every successful modern funnel will use some kind of email, especially for B2B marketers who need to provide their prospects with a significant amount of information along each step of their funnel.

Unlike some of the other elements discussed in this post, most people know the importance of email subject lines. They are frequently cited as determining whether people even open an email. According to Zippia, just under half of all email recipients will open an email based on the subject line alone. Similarly, about 7 in 10 email recipients will mark an email as spam based solely on the subject line.

Here are a few ways to A/B test email subject lines:

  • Experiment with length. Shorter is usually better here. Generally, it’s recommended that your email subjects be somewhere between 20 and 60 characters, but you should run some tests to find your own sweet spot.
  • Incorporate one or more emojis. Of course, it’s important to understand your audience and the email’s subject matter – with certain somber topics, it may not be smart to use emojis. On the other hand, an unexpected emoji can be a great way to stand out in someone’s inbox.
  • Sentence structure. Sometimes, a question is the most effective way to get a recipient’s attention. In other cases, using a short statement or fact is best. Remember that many marketers get in trouble by trying to make their subject lines too mysterious or clever. This mystery is often a direct route to the spam folder.

Regarding length and timing, the guidelines we mentioned apply here: start with a small percentage of your list receiving alternate subject lines. A 70/30 split is a great starting point; from there, you can slowly increase the number of subscribers who receive the alternate version.

Also, remember that you’ll need to get sufficient data to ensure that your test results have value. The specific amount of time it takes for your data to be significant varies depending on the size of your list, but you’ll generally want to give the test at least a week.

Final Thoughts on A/B testing  

Anyone who says A/B testing isn’t valuable to their marketing funnel or overall business probably hasn’t been able to find an approach that works for them. Indeed, there are some situations where A/B testing isn’t the best option for tweaking your funnel.

But in many cases, all that’s standing between you and a successful A/B test is the right approach. If you’ve been struggling to find meaningful results from A/B testing, or you simply want to get an outside perspective on improving the process, our team at FunnelEnvy can help. We have many years of combined experience helping companies of all sizes in all industries ensure they get the most out of the resources they put into testing.

Just click here to fill out a quick quiz to learn more about us and our pricing and determine how best we can assist you with your funnel optimization requirements.

By |2023-03-13T11:34:09-07:00March 20th, 2023|Analytics, A/B Testing|0 Comments
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3 Symptoms of Siloed Data and How to Fix It

Data siloing is like a poisonous, invisible gas: it’s hard to identify, you may not even know it’s affecting you, and it can cause significant health problems for your business.

Before we go any further, let’s back up and establish the term’s meaning. “Data siloing” is when you store important information in your business in a single, isolated place that is not easily accessible for people in the company outside of those who originally put it there. The term comes from the traditional silo used in agriculture to store grain or other supplies in bulk.

But unlike traditional silos, which are easily visible to most people, data siloing is challenging to identify. In fact, in our experience, companies suffering the most from data siloing don’t even know it’s an issue.

In this article, we’re going to correct that problem. Below are three of the most significant symptoms of data siloing. After we outline each problem, we’ll include a general fix for the problem that you can apply to these and other symptoms.   

Redundancy and Repetition Across Departments

Most companies organize their teams into groups ranging from a handful of people to dozens of employees, depending on the size of the company and the nature of its work. Given this inherent separation between teams, it’s normal for there to be some repeated information across groups.

Suppose you see a huge percentage of information repeated in meetings, presentations, or other kinds of department-level communication, though. In that case, it’s a good sign that each group may have its data siloed. One classic example is a separation between an organization’s sales and marketing teams, which happens to companies of almost every size. Marketing teams often collect data related to a prospect’s initial demographic info: the size of the company they work at, their job title, etc. Once the sales team gets involved, they typically learn new information related to more specific details about the prospect. If the two teams don’t share data sufficiently, it can lead to repetition of the same tasks and frustration on the part of the prospect, ultimately causing them to drop out of the sales funnel.

Teammates Ask Several Questions About Other Departments

One of the most obvious signs that your company has a siloing problem is when individuals in separate departments have very few details about how different parts of the organization work. This disconnect often leads to questions about how the other part of the company completes tasks, inquiries they wouldn’t ask if data wasn’t so siloed.

Remember that there will always be some degree of separation between departments – that’s their nature. You wouldn’t expect someone in marketing to understand how to put together a quarterly accounting statement, just as you wouldn’t expect someone on the support desk to work on developing your company website. But when different departments in a company don’t have a basic understanding of how other groups work – where their files are stored, how they communicate internally, etc. – it’s a sign that you may store their data too far apart.
 

Changing Access Levels Takes Longer Than Expected

From small shops with just a few people to the largest global enterprises, companies of all sizes have some sort of permission structure. These systems typically govern things like access to software platforms, the ability to read and write data in a certain folder, or access to a certain email inbox.

During a normal month or quarter, it’s common to change these permission levels for several reasons. Old employees leave, new employees start, and some may even change positions in the team, bringing up a need for different permissions. It’s okay if permissions don’t change instantly, but if it’s regularly taking your team several days or weeks to change permission levels, it’s a sign that your data and processes may have a problem with siloing.

Solving the Siloed Data Problem

As we mentioned, these indicators are just symptoms of an issue with siloed data in your organization. You may come across other signs in your organization, but it’s arguably most important to note that you may not come across any signs at all. Data siloing can happen even within a growing organization that seems successful otherwise. It might not be a mission-critical issue, but if you don’t nip it in the bud right away, it can grow into something much more serious. Even if it never becomes the issue that threatens your business’s existence, there’s still a chance it can prevent you from operating at maximum efficiency.

Data siloing can happen even within a growing organization that seems successful otherwise. Click To Tweet

In our experience, the best way to prevent siloed data from becoming a problem that threatens your business to any degree is to implement a shared data platform that all the different teams in your business can access to share relevant information. Regarding sales and marketing alignment, we suggest our clients implement a tool known as a customer data platform or CDP.  

The benefit of using a CDP is that, unlike traditional data-storing methods, this platform allows information to be put in and taken out by all the appropriate parties and applications. We refer to this as bidirectional integration. In other words, a CDP can integrate with all the tools you’re already using in your stack: a CRM, website analytics tool, email automation platform, etc.

In ideal cases, not only will implementing a CDP help you better manage the data your business uses on a day-to-day basis, it will help you get more out of that information to serve organizational goals better. For example, suppose you can input information about visitors to your website and the specific pages they visit. In that case, you might then be able to integrate it with data from your sales department about which particular parts of your solution prospects were most interested. The conclusions you can gain from these two types of data combined will be much more effective than the information you gain from analyzing the data alone, which often happens when siloed.

Final Word on Siloed Data

Although it’s not the most obvious problem or glamorous challenge to solve in your business, siloed data is still a profound issue worth trying to prevent. If you let it fester and expand within your business, it can eventually become such a severe problem that it impacts conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Are you concerned that your organization may be suffering from siloing, or simply want to take preventive measures to prevent this situation from happening in the future? Our team is available to help. We have years of experience ensuring our clients can leverage the data they gather across the entire organization instead of watching their productivity suffer from inefficient communication and unnecessary re-work.

To get started, just click here and fill out a short questionnaire that will help you learn more about FunnelEnvy pricing and give us the info we need to determine how best we can assist.

By |2023-02-08T18:35:48-08:00February 20th, 2023|Analytics, A/B Testing|0 Comments
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The 3 Most Important UX Considerations in Your Funnel

Now that the digital marketing space is maturing, the focus is increasingly on the finer details of digital experiences. Most marketers already recognize the importance of major pillars like email, social media, and web design. Plenty of different software and service options are available to help organizations in need.

Success on a broad level in channels like email marketing and social media is still vital, but they’ve become the minimum barrier to entry for top-quality B2B marketing. In 2023 and beyond, the best marketers will not only be nailing the larger elements of their funnels but also understand how to give prospects a desirable experience through the less obvious aspects of their campaigns.

We call them less obvious because, individually, it may not seem like the details that comprise user experience (UX) considerations will have that big of an impact on the success of a funnel. But when combined, these factors can determine whether a prospect has a positive or negative overall experience with your funnel, which in turn impacts their decision to do business with you.

Below, we’ll talk about three crucial UX elements of your funnel that you might have overlooked and give tips on addressing them in your campaigns.

Progress Bars and Indicators

In today’s world of increasingly crunched deadlines, dwindling attention spans, and bite-sized content, your prospects’ time is likely stretched thinner than ever before. That’s why it’s important to show appreciation for every second they give your marketing by explaining how much time it’s going to take for them to get through each part of your form.

Research shows that using progress bars can make people more willing to devote time to a form or wait for a page to load. Of course, you shouldn’t make users wait long for elements on your page (we’ll get to that in the next section), but there’s always going to be some level of load time. Similarly, it will always take some time for a prospect to give you the information needed to advance the sales cycle. The best you can do is make that time as painless as possible.  

Of course, the B2B world can be a little different. When it comes to complex sales cycles or those in industries with many regulations, most prospects understand that it’ll take some time to get through their buying journey. On a macro level, B2B transactions generally take longer than B2C. While you can use that to your advantage by requesting more information at an earlier stage in the buying process, never take for granted the time prospects’ are willing to invest in your funnel. Progress bars, page numbers, and completion time estimates are all helpful tools for this area.

It will always take some time for a prospect to give you the information needed to advance the sales cycle. The best you can do is make that time as painless as possible. Click To Tweet

Page Speed and Responsiveness

We’ve paired these ideas together because they are both ultimately technical requirements for your website and its funnel elements. Your site needs to load quickly enough to stop people from getting impatient and leaving. It also needs to load properly on each device a prospect could use to visit your funnel. Both concepts have been critical in B2B marketing for quite some time, yet we still come across plenty of organizations leaving a lot to be desired with how their page appears to users.

Page speed is vital for the UX of your funnel, in part because of the short attention spans of modern web users. According to Google, the chance a user will bounce increases by 32% after a page’s load time reaches 3 seconds. You don’t want your funnel to stick out like a sore thumb when a user has been browsing other fast-loading pages, a situation we, unfortunately, encounter with clients in industries like healthcare and manufacturing.

As for responsiveness, there’s a straightforward standard your funnel elements should live up to; they must be viewable and equally usable on any device. Page visitors shouldn’t have any issue navigating your funnel site, whether using a keyboard, stylus, or their fingers on a touchscreen. Remember to frequently test different versions and sizes of your funnel as part of your efforts to optimize conversions.

Content Quality and Tone

This final area is more abstract, but it might be the most important. “Content” doesn’t simply mean the writing on your forms, landing pages, or other funnel elements. It’s an all-encompassing term that combines those elements with their design, multimedia, and the trade-off you’re looking for users to make (typically filling out a form for some kind of asset).

Take a step back and simplify your campaign to its essentials: what are you offering? Is it compelling enough for prospects to give you what you’re seeking from them? A law firm’s office manager may be willing to provide their name and email address for an eBook but may not want to provide their physical address, phone number, or other personal details. On the other hand, if you’re working on some kind of funnel further along the pipeline, like an appointment or consultation request, prospects may be more willing to give you that type of information.

The tone of your funnel content is also important for the user’s experience. Part of this is human nature – people inherently want to like and trust others they meet who are similar to themselves. However, when it comes to B2B transactions, buyers are responsible for ensuring they’re working with vendors with a sufficient understanding of their field. Writing is, of course, a big element of your tone. Other factors can include:

  • The clothes worn by people in video content
  • The colors in your funnel’s design
  • Fonts and typefaces used in parts of your funnel
  • The use of industry-specific jargon

In many cases, prospects don’t expect vendors to have the same depth of knowledge about a field – an accounting firm purchasing business software probably won’t expect the developer to be able to audit their books, for example – but they do expect them to be familiar with critical elements of the industry and how they work. Even if it’s communicated subtly, showing prospects your understanding of their needs can go a long way in improving your funnel. 

Where to Start With UX Considerations in Your Funnel

Each of these three areas of UX is relatively involved and could require its own campaigns to address. There are many other UX factors, some of which might even be more important to address in your funnel than the ones listed here. Knowing this, how do you decide where to begin with optimizing your funnel? 

There’s only one answer: experiment, analyze the data, iterate, and repeat the cycle. It’s easy to guess what will be the most effective way to improve the UX of your marketing elements. But with actual data – conversion rates, heat maps, bounce rates, and ROI – you can see which parts of your funnel need fixing.

Looking for assistance running these tests, or simply want to get a few more sets of (expert) eyes on your funnel UX optimization? Our team at FunnelEnvy is ready to jump in and help. Just click this link and fill out a short questionnaire to learn more about our pricing and how we can ensure your prospects have a better experience with your marketing elements in 2023 and beyond.

By |2023-01-11T21:26:15-08:00January 23rd, 2023|Analytics, A/B Testing|0 Comments
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4 Key Metrics for Your B2B Sales Pipeline

There’s a lot for marketers today to consider when it comes to tactics for bringing in new business, but your sales pipeline is what ultimately defines the success of all your funnels, marketing campaigns, and other efforts to add new clients and revenue consistently. But considering the huge array of software tools and data available to modern B2B marketers, it can feel overwhelming to measure all the metrics in a pipeline.

We’ve identified four of the most important metrics for B2B marketers looking to understand their pipeline better. Every company is different, but in our experience, an organization can get a great sense of the overall health of its pipeline by paying attention to the four metrics below.

Velocity

Sales velocity is defined by HubSpot as the measurement of how quickly a deal moves through a pipeline and turns into actual revenue. Velocity is an important metric because it helps you understand and identify obstacles or bottlenecks in your sales process. It doesn’t matter how great your landing pages or nurture sequences are – if there’s an issue with your pipeline velocity, it’ll constrain your sales.

It doesn’t matter how great your landing pages or nurture sequences are – if there’s an issue with your pipeline velocity, it’ll constrain your sales. Click To Tweet

The widely-accepted formula for calculating pipeline velocity is to multiply the number of opportunities by the average deal value, then times your team’s average close rate, and divide that number by the length of your sales cycle. This formula is a great starting place to closely analyze each part of your pipeline to determine any obstacles. 

For example, perhaps when evaluating the sales cycle length, you realize that your sales team is taking too long to follow up after the initial appointment with a prospect. Armed with this knowledge, you can adjust your sales process and inform your reps to follow up immediately after an appointment to keep the prospect moving through the sales journey.

Deal Size

The size of your deals doesn’t require any kind of complex formula to calculate, but it can still be difficult to identify issues in this area without some intentional analysis. For example, if your company has the same number of opportunities with the same sales cycle length as last year, but your revenue is down, it’s a sign that you may not be pursuing large enough deals.

Addressing a deal size issue is solely a matter of prospecting. Here are a few tips for finding higher-value prospects:

  • Use account-based marketing (or ABM). ABM defines a process by which you identify a handful of high-value accounts and create customized sales and marketing collateral explicitly designed for those accounts. According to Gartner, by the end of 2020, over 70% of marketers at midsize and large B2B organizations will be using or testing ABM.
  • Invest in thought leadership or content that brands give for free to gain trust and credibility by helping its intended audience. In a study published by LinkedIn and Edelman last year, 60% of B2B buyers said thought leadership builds credibility when a brand enters a new category, and 54% said they purchased a new product or service they had not previously considered. Thought leadership can help attract a more discerning type of buyer.
  • Get social. Participate in events, post on social media, and engage with your prospects in their communities. Remember to be genuine – it’s easy for people to identify someone who’s only interacting with them for the sake of a sale. Let your natural sense of curiosity and desire to help people guide your interactions.

Close Rate

Another straightforward yet critical metric for your sales funnel, a close rate identifies the number of prospects that become paying clients relative to the overall number of leads generated by your marketing efforts. Every company will have a slightly different close rate depending on the nature of their business. A more specialized company with a niche audience might be fine with a close rate between 5% and 7%, while others might be aiming closer to double digits or beyond.

While it’s possible to find general data online about close rates, a better approach is to track your own company’s close rate and assess where it needs to be for sufficient revenue growth. If there are problems with your close rate, it’s generally a sign to evaluate your sales team, the specifics of your client offer, or both. Solicit feedback from prospects whenever possible to better understand which elements are slowing down your close rate.

Sales to Support Ratio

This ratio may not be specifically related to the performance of your sales or marketing, but it’s still vital to understand how your sales pipeline affects the rest of your operations. It’s sometimes expressed as “sales staff to support staff,” but it isn’t necessarily just the number of people working at the organization in each department. For smaller companies with employees or contractors who handle multiple organizational tasks, it isn’t a simple “this to that” ratio. 

However you quantify it, this metric is vital to understanding how much of your capacity the company uses for each client. You can also track this number based on deal size, client longevity, and other measures to get a sense of which types of clients require the most attention from your support team. You can use this data in your sales and marketing efforts going forward, helping you focus on the best types of buyers for your offering.

In a well-balanced organization, sales and support can handle a sufficient volume of responsibility that allows the company to stay on track with its goals. In assessing this metric at your own company, you may need to either increase your sales activity or add additional capacity for support, depending on how much your company’s product requires.

Final Word on Key Metrics for Your Pipeline

It’s essential to customize your pipeline metrics like any sales or marketing data. Every company has its own needs, meaning it might not make sense to track the same metrics as an organization in a different industry.

For best results with these pipeline metrics, track them for as long as possible and establish a performance baseline in each area. Note where the numbers are when things at the company are going well and vice versa when you hit a slow period. Doing this allows you to gain insight into where each of your metrics should be, giving you better context when you analyze your pipeline going forward.

If you’re unsure about what steps you need to take or which metrics to track to help improve the performance of your organization’s sales and marketing performance, our team is ready to help. FunnelEnvy has several years of combined experience working with B2B clients to identify gaps in their funnels, tweak critical elements like forms and landing pages, and optimize other aspects of the lead nurturing process to maximize your conversion rate.

Click here to take a short quiz and learn more about our pricing structure.

By |2022-10-20T04:37:11-07:00October 31st, 2022|Analytics, A/B Testing|0 Comments
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Finding the Right Analytics Operator for Your Marketing

Software is essential for successful B2B marketing campaigns, but it’s only half the battle. You can have the most sophisticated software deployed on top-of-the-line hardware – but if you don’t have the right people running it, you won’t maximize your (likely significant) investment into these resources. It’s like racing with a souped-up car driven by someone who’s never been behind the wheel.

You need your marketing tools and the people using them to be well-aligned so that your organization can take full advantage of today’s technology. Whether you’re running complicated data analytics platforms driven by AI and machine learning or a simple email marketing automation platform doesn’t matter. The people responsible for them need to be well-suited for the role and equipped with everything they need to be successful.

In this article, we’ll go over a few different ways you can find the right operator for your analytics, including information about the pros and cons of each method. Finally, we’ll offer some general tips on how to set up whoever you choose to operate your marketing analytics to do the best job possible.

Internal Assignment

The quickest way to find an operator for your marketing analytics platforms is to choose someone on your existing team to take the role. Even if your organization already has a well-defined marketing department that manages its own tools, this step can come with some challenges. What if it’s a new system with which no one has training? If they have the expertise, does your internal marketing team have the bandwidth to take on the responsibility of another platform?

This path gets even trickier for early-stage companies that don’t have someone designated to oversee these types of tools. These super-lean organizations typically have to assign the role to someone who already has a lot on their plate, which brings up the potential for errors or incomplete data.

If you plan to go this route, ensure the internal team member has the necessary availability and knowledge. Otherwise, this option should be a short-term choice that you transition out of immediately – for example, having a marketing manager run an analytics platform until you can transition the responsibilities into a more-fitting candidate.

Hiring a New Team Member

This is ideal if all circumstances allow it. Adding someone to your team specifically to manage one or more analytics platforms is an excellent way to have a dedicated resource on this task, ensuring that it never slips to the bottom of the list of an employee with more generalized skills.

Of course, the challenge with this method is it requires the largest investment of time and money. Giving a task to an existing team member can be done instantly, and you can quickly start most external marketing resources if there’s an urgent need. Hiring a new person, though will take weeks, if not months, from start to finish. Even when you’ve completed the hiring process, there’s still a ramp-up time while the employee gets comfortable and fully acclimates to the new responsibilities.

On the other hand, if you don’t need someone immediately and have the capital available to support a dedicated team member, this might be the best choice. This is especially true if you’re looking for someone to manage a marketing system you use frequently. Choosing this option also gives you the most control over how you operate your marketing analytics.

Even when you’ve completed the hiring process, there’s still a ramp-up time while the employee gets comfortable and fully acclimates to the new responsibilities. Click To Tweet

Using an External Resource

This choice typically involves initiating a working relationship with an agency or contractor (or both, depending on the complexity of your needs). In the best cases, an external resource should be a middle ground between assigning marketing management roles to poorly-qualified or overworked existing team members and hiring someone new.

This option still has a process that requires screening, and you may interview contractors or agencies the same way you might interview a full-time team member. The big difference here is cost – except for the most high-end, premier operators in the field, you can usually bring on an external resource for a fraction of the cost of hiring a new team member.

It’s also a quicker process to get them started, and there’s no long-term commitment required when hiring a dedicated team. Additionally, it’s much easier to scale workloads up and down when you use an external resource. This is great for seasonal businesses that may need a lot of work for a few months of the year but don’t have the demand for marketing analytics management to sustain a full-time team member year-round.

The drawback of using an external resource is that you’ll still need to devote time to managing and directing them, especially at the beginning stages. You’ll also have less control over how they work – in fact, legal standards dictate that you cannot provide specific requirements for when, where, and how work gets done when you hire a contractor. Some agencies or contractors spread particularly thin may not communicate the way you’d prefer.

Setting Up Any Type of Marketing Analytics Operator for Success

None of these three options is the right or wrong answer. Many companies have used all three approaches for marketing operators – some larger companies may even need to apply all three simultaneously.

Whichever source you decide on for your marketing analytics operator, you can do a few things to help them do the best possible job they can:

  • Be descriptive. This applies to everything from the initial job description you use to hire to the ongoing instructions you provide on new projects. Use quantitative, specific language when discussing skills, responsibilities, project timelines, and everything else you discuss with your analytics operator.
  • Communicate. In the era of remote work, it’s imperative to ensure the lines of communication between you and your team members stay open. You should be proactive about getting in touch and asking if they have any questions or obstacles – particularly when they’re new in the role and still getting settled.
  • Allow them to have input. Very few people want to be in a position with completely rigid instructions and no room for personalization. Autonomy is particularly important for employees of your company, who will want to incorporate their own unique skills and interests into their day-to-day role

The Last Word on Finding a Skilled Marketing Analytics Operator

It doesn’t matter how many resources you invest in the right tools for marketing analytics. If you don’t have the right person or people at the helm of the operation, you will eventually be disappointed in your ROI. On the other hand, bringing on the right talent – even if it’s a freelancer or someone you already have on the team – can help you maximize your return on investment in marketing analytics, even if your tools are limited.

Interested in working with our team of B2B marketing funnel specialists? Just fill out this short quiz to see if you’d be a good fit for FunnelEnvy. We can help you optimize how you approach marketing analytics so that it’s much easier for anyone – individual or agency – to achieve the desired results.

By |2022-09-05T04:58:29-07:00September 19th, 2022|Analytics, A/B Testing|0 Comments
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The Top 4 A/B Tests That Will Drive Revenue

Experimentation is at the heart of digital marketing success in almost any area, from paid advertising to content production. Marketers are constantly pushing the envelope to innovate in a way that brings measurable results to their organizations.

Modern marketing technology allows us to run experiments on many areas, from buying behaviors and customer preferences to information delivery techniques and specific advertising messages. A/B testing, or split testing, has been used for decades to improve customer satisfaction in B2C businesses. In the last few decades, technology has allowed B2B marketers to run powerful, sophisticated experiments leveraging analytics and machine learning. By some measures, more than half of all B2B marketers today use A/B testing as their primary conversion rate optimization (CRO) method.

On a basic level, many organizations could improve their websites and drive more customers to their products and services by using A/B testing to identify what works and doesn’t. However, with so many tests available to run, knowing which ones will give you the best return on investment (ROI) can be difficult.

We’ve compiled a list of the top four A/B tests for B2B marketers that can directly impact ROI through increased conversion rates.

Form Names and Text

You’ll likely use forms in conversion elements at every point in a funnel. The names of your forms and the text within them can impact conversions more than you may think. A/B testing can help you determine which form of words and text are most effective in getting people to convert. Try testing different fonts and header placements to see if any are more effective than others. You could also switch up the order of fields to see if visitors prefer to fill out one before the other.

This small change can make a big difference in your conversion rate. Remember not to change any form fields for existing clients or customers so drastically that people who already have an account with you are redirected back to fill out their information again. Also, remember that less is more: asking too many questions might scare away potential customers. On the other hand, adding new elements to a form may show visitors that you really understand their particular issues, pushing them closer to converting.

Element Colors

Different hues can evoke different emotions in your website visitors, which impacts how users interact with your website or app. Try different combinations of colors and see which ones result in the most conversions. According to researchers, blue is often associated with calming safety and trustworthiness, while red is associated with urgency and excitement. Green is typically associated with nature and growth.

You want your funnel pages to be visually appealing to potential customers, but you don’t want to go overboard. You can turn them away with too many bright colors or combinations that clash. A/B testing can help you find the perfect balance of colors for your website. A few specific areas to test different color combinations include background, text, button, and form field colors.

Also, remember not to go overboard on changes in a single experiment. Try to test just one color against another (e.g., red vs. green) by changing just one element at a time to measure each change’s effect on your conversion rates.

CTA Language

Asking your visitors to take action correctly can differentiate between a successful conversion and a bounced visitor. But what words should you use in your call-to-action? That’s where A/B testing comes in. Marketers can try out different phrases and see which ones get the best results. 

Generally, you shouldn’t overuse generic terms like “Click here!” or “Go.” Visitors are more likely to convert when they know exactly what you’re asking them to do. Ensure your CTAs include clear directions about what will be on the other side to avoid confusion and frustration over unmet expectations.

Emphasizing the benefits of your product or service in your CTA can be another powerful way to increase conversions. People are always more likely to take action if they know what’s in it for them. For example, if you’re promoting a case study that shows how your accounting software streamlines a firm’s operations, instead of using “Download the case study,” try something like “See how [Client A] saved 30% on staffing costs.”

Images

Though it’s something of a cliche by now, when it comes to conversion rate optimization, a good picture really can be worth a thousand words. A/B testing can help to find the perfect image for your funnel. One way to A/B test images is to divide them into categories, then test pictures in each category against one another.

For example, you might choose categories like:

  • People
  • Faces
  • Landscapes
  • Abstract

After that decision, you can test images of the same category, then compare how images in different categories perform. This is just one option – the specific level of detail you want to A/B test with your images will depend on how many visuals you have and the nature of its placement in the funnel. In other words: you may not need to A/B test every image you send out in your weekly newsletter, but you might want to be more thorough when it comes to testing the one image you include on a critical landing page in your funnel.

One way to A/B test images is to divide them into categories, then test pictures in each category against one another. Click To Tweet

A Final Note on A/B Testing

Though A/B testing is undoubtedly popular and can be effective, it comes with its own drawbacks and dangers. As we’ve covered previously, you shouldn’t consider A/B testing as a panacea that will fix all the issues with your campaign. We’ve worked with many clients who gathered little to no valuable data from A/B tests, despite waiting many weeks or months to collect data. A/B testing can also be difficult for newer ventures that haven’t yet had enough time to build up a sufficient traffic baseline to be statistically significant.

That’s why we suggest using A/B testing strategically as a supplement to your CRO efforts. We believe that for modern B2B marketers to achieve the greatest success from A/B tests, it’s essential to move past “experimentation 1.0.” Marketers should consider their customer’s holistic journey and optimize each stage in concert with one another, using personalized insights and data about their preferences and habits whenever possible.

Are you looking for some assistance with integrating A/B testing into your funnel? Maybe you’ve already been running A/B tests for a while and haven’t seen the definitive data you were hoping for to direct your campaigns going forward. FunnelEnvy specializes in helping all types of B2B clients make A/B testing and other CRO experiments much more effective through the use of personalized solutions custom-built for a specific audience of sophisticated decision-makers.

Want to learn more about our services? Click here to fill out a short quiz that will help determine if we’d be a good fit to work together.

By |2022-08-10T18:04:29-07:00August 22nd, 2022|A/B Testing, Analytics|0 Comments
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Know Your Numbers: The Top Metrics for B2B Inbound Marketing

Numbers are key in any kind of marketing. While some people may want to operate their campaigns using a preferred method or channel, only actual data can show whether or not decisions are successful. 

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of confusion among marketers today about what numbers are the most important to track. The huge expansion of the marketing technology sphere over the last decade has led to the creation of all kinds of statistics that may or may not be relevant to your business.

A handful of metrics should matter most for B2B marketers, though. The data you generate from tracking the below numbers will provide the most insight into your marketing efforts and how well they’re performing.

Qualified Leads

A qualified lead is someone vetted as a valid potential customer. Generally speaking, there are two levels of leads generated by marketing activity:

  • Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are prospective customers who have shown some interest in your online marketing. Here, the most common examples include someone signing up for your email newsletter or filling out a form to download a longer lead magnet such as an eBook or white paper.
  • Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are the next step beyond an MQL. An SQL is vetted by someone on either the marketing or sales team as a legitimate prospect that is able to purchase what your company is offering. For example, a lead who has exchanged a few emails with someone at your company might be qualified to move from an MQL to an SQL.

To qualify leads, you can refer back to the classic BANT framework: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. If you’re using the BANT formula to qualify a lead, make sure you apply it to the specific person with whom you’re dealing. Just because the company you’re talking to has a need for your offering and can afford it doesn’t mean your contact has the authority to seal the deal.

If you’re using the BANT formula to qualify a lead, make sure you apply it to the specific person with whom you’re dealing. Click To Tweet

Pipeline Size

The size of your pipeline is defined as the number of active deals you have going on at any given time, in any stage of the sales process – from the newest leads to that one major deal your team has been working on for weeks. Your pipeline size is a dollar amount that adds up the total value of all the potential business you might be able to win in the short and mid-term future. Don’t forget to include existing clients that make repeat purchases every month or quarter – though it’s important not to rely too heavily on this type of business.

Knowing your pipeline size can help for a few reasons. First, it enables you to understand whether or not you’re doing enough marketing. A too-small pipeline could indicate that the marketing you’re creating isn’t compelling enough to generate interest in your product or service. How big should your pipeline be? You will hear anecdotal advice and rules of thumb ranging anywhere from 1.5 to 5 times your sales targets. The truth is that your pipeline goals will vary dramatically depending on what you’re selling. It’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all ratio – instead, you should experiment and see what pipeline size to sales ratio strikes the best balance between growth and overwhelm for your team. 

Another helpful pipeline-related metric to track is your pipeline velocity. To calculate your pipeline velocity, multiply your number of deals by average deal size by win percentage, then divide the resulting number by the number of days in your sales cycle.

Metrics for marketing

Source: HubSpot

Your sales pipeline velocity tells you how many deals you are closing and how much revenue is moving through the pipeline each day. A higher velocity is obviously better. If your velocity isn’t where you want it, consider the factors slowing down deals from closing.

Meetings Set

Meetings are an essential part of sales metrics because they represent a significant transition point in the customer journey. To use an analogy from the dating world: it’s like going from having someone’s phone number and exchanging a few texts or phone calls to meeting up with them in real life. Things may or may not work out, but taking that step represents a level of commitment that doesn’t happen with everyone.

Meetings help you understand how often your people are getting in front of qualified customers. Tracking your meetings to leads ratio can help you identify the quality of your leads. If you’re getting lots of engagement with your marketing materials but aren’t setting that many meetings, it could be an issue with the kind of people you’re attracting. On the other hand, if you’re scheduling several meetings, but they aren’t resulting in closed business, it may be a good time to revisit some of your sales processes or refresh your team on best practices.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost (or CAC) is a relatively simple metric, but it can reveal a lot about your sales and marketing processes. To calculate your CAC, simply divide the total amount of money spent on all marketing activities by the number of clients generated. For a simple example, if your annual marketing budget is $100,000 and you were able to bring in 200 new customers from that marketing, your CAC is $500. 

Once you’ve determined your CAC, an easy way to evaluate the efficiency of your marketing is to compare it to your average customer lifetime value (LTV). Without knowing your LTV, it’s challenging to understand whether or not your CAC is where you want it. Continuing the example above: if an average customer will spend $1,250 with the company, a $500 CAC is excellent. That means you’re getting back roughly $2.50 in revenue for every $1 spent acquiring a customer.

On the other hand, say your LTV is only $250. Then, you have a problem because you’re spending $1 to bring $0.50 worth of business. Again, this is a straightforward example with round numbers for easy calculation. Still, these numbers will help you understand how to apply your CAC within the broader context of your marketing operations.    

Conclusion: Only Trust the [Right] Numbers

One thing we aren’t lacking in digital marketing is beliefs on how things should be done. It’s easy to sit around and theorize or talk about what we think might work for B2B marketing.

But the reality is that metrics are the only way to know which ideas are genuinely effective and which are just nice theories to talk about in meetings. Every company will have a slightly different perspective on where their numbers should be and what they should be looking for as they review marketing data. When it comes to metrics, remember to pick the right numbers to track and follow them consistently to gain a comprehensive picture of your marketing and its effectiveness.

Do you need some help filtering through all the marketing data you have to identify what matters? Or maybe you aren’t even sure where to start collecting data and want guidance from a specialist. Fill out this short quiz to learn more about how the conversion rate optimization experts at FunnelEnvy may be able to help.

By |2022-04-05T04:19:03-07:00April 18th, 2022|Analytics|0 Comments
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Getting the Most Out of Paid Media Spend in 2022

For marketers looking to reach a specific audience quickly, few methods can achieve results like paid advertising. By the year 2023, video ad spending on social networks in the U.S. is projected to surpass $28 billion, according to HootSuite. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are considered supremely valuable by corporate marketers looking to quickly get in front of the right people – even if they haven’t addressed that audience previously. Paid ads have also been a boon for small local businesses, targeting their campaigns only within a given geographic region.

However, marketers have seen the price of ads on major social platforms – particularly Facebook and Instagram – increase in recent years. Part of this is a result of the pandemic of 2020, which caused an initial reduction in paid media prices due to reduced spending that later corrected after advertisers realized the new importance of digital reach. Additional pressure on Facebook ads has come as a result of high-profile moves by Apple to restrict tracking and cookies on its devices, a shift popular with many consumers but problematic for advertisers and their networks. Executives at Meta said Apple’s privacy changes alone could cost the company $10 billion in revenue.

The increased competitiveness in the world of paid ads is why it’s more important than ever before to maximize return on ad spend (ROAS). We’ll cover some tips to optimize your paid media lead generation campaigns in this post.

Evaluate the Conversion Experience First

When looking to improve the performance of their paid ads, many marketers make the mistake of bringing in more leads. But in many cases, a higher quantity of traffic doesn’t always translate to a higher quantity of leads. Even if it does, that doesn’t always mean the leads will be of good quality. 

Before you dump more ad money into reaching a wider audience, consider the elements of the conversion experience at every step of the campaign. This includes:

  • Form fields
  • Button design and placement
  • Form and button copy
  • Multimedia elements
  • Social proof 

Even the smallest tweak might have an unexpectedly large impact on your conversion rate. Remember to perform proper A/B testing on each of these elements so that you can use accurate and relevant data to understand what your audience wants.

Before you dump more ad money into reaching a wider audience, consider the elements of the conversion experience at every step of the campaign. Click To Tweet

Use Closed-Loop Analytics

Another common mistake we see made by marketers is evaluating prospects’ actions in a vacuum. They think only about how someone engages with one specific set of social media or video advertisements. The problem with this approach is it ignores all of the other behaviors in different parts of their customer journey. This data is ripe to be used in the creation of more effective marketing. Gaining a full picture of prospect behavior is especially important in the B2B space, where buyers have many different agendas and priorities to consider as they evaluate purchasing options. 

To avoid this shallow view of the prospect, it’s important to “close the loop” with your marketing. That means you should integrate all the tools you use in your marketing to share data – even if they aren’t directly involved in the campaign where this data is being applied.

We believe Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools for digital marketing because of its universal nature. It may not be as sophisticated as newer tools, but it’s compatible with so many different kinds of marketing tech that it can be a valuable foundation for your stack. It’s also reliable – there’s no concern about the company folding overnight and leaving clients high and dry.

For best results, consider going beyond just linking Google Analytics to your marketing tools and connecting everything you possibly can, from your eCommerce platforms to your CRM, your website CMS, and other tools. It won’t be possible to integrate everything, but the more data you can share, the better you’ll be able to calibrate paid media and other marketing campaigns.

Remember, closing the loop isn’t always just about data. Bringing together your sales and marketing teams to compare notes on what does and doesn’t work is a great way to ensure that your company’s approach to business development isn’t being harmed by the “silo” effect – where different departments don’t communicate. The collective efforts of sales and marketing teams looking to improve the selling process are sometimes referred to as sales enablement. For more on sales enablement, check out this helpful guide from HubSpot.

Test Ad Creative

One of the final considerations for maximizing your paid media spend is ad creative. We typically advise our clients to consider other elements of their campaigns first, especially if the creative in question has been successful in the past. But if you’ve looked elsewhere and felt that the ad could use a refresh, changing its visual elements and text may be a wise choice.

The ad’s creative elements are particularly easy to evaluate through A/B testing. It’s relatively simple to break down the ad into different components, change each one, and see which one offers the most impact. The typical elements of a paid ad include a main image, some ad copy, a headline, and a call-to-action button. Check out the below example from Shopify:

Paid media spend

In this example, elements you might evaluate through A/B testing include the text (currently describing Google algorithm updates), the button CTA, the image, and the title next to the button. Isolating each of these elements could help you determine which version works the best. Until you’ve run experiments on each different part of the ad, it’s impossible to tell what needs to be improved and what should stay the same for optimal performance. You may not need to perform testing this extensively for every ad in your campaign, but it can help troubleshoot those that fail to perform or see performance levels drop off significantly.

Final Thoughts on Optimizing Paid Media in 2022

One of the big challenges of paid advertising for B2B companies is the nature of the transaction. Business purchases tend to be larger, more complex, and take more time to evaluate than a consumer buying something for personal use at home. B2B buyers often don’t have sole authority the way consumers do, and many are naturally suspicious of companies that use traditional sales tactics or ad campaigns with promises that seem too good to be true.

That doesn’t mean paid ad campaigns can’t be effective for B2B marketers, though. You can still attract people to your brand by promoting informative content assets or other tools that provide actual value to your audience. The advertising landscape is more competitive than ever before, which is why it’s vital to maximize the dollars invested into paid placements. By fine-tuning your conversion experience, sharing data, and thoroughly A/B testing, you can give your business a much better chance at using paid media to bring in leads that will drive the continued growth of the organization.

By |2022-03-09T10:26:47-08:00March 21st, 2022|Analytics|0 Comments
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Optimizing Campaigns & Websites by Integrating Offline Conversions into Google Analytics

Integrating offline conversions into Google Analytics can help you optimize your campaigns and website experiences. This is something that we commonly do for our customers when we’re optimizing their inbound funnels. In this post I’m going to go into some of the details about how it actually works.

So, what do I mean by offline conversions? If you’re doing demand or lead generation you’re capturing those leads onsite, typically through a form or  a chatbot. As you know that’s only a small part of the much larger funnel, most of which happens offline. Your Marketing Qualified Leads, Sales Qualified Leads, opportunity stages, closed won revenue. Those are all captured offline – and can think of them as offline goal conversions.

In addition to being offline, you also have the distinction, if you’re in B2B, of having individual offline conversions, like qualified leads versus account or company level conversions, like opportunities or revenue.

demand generation funnel

This can also exist in the e-commerce world, especially if you’re in B2B. You might be selling products on your site but also have volume based quote functionality where larger buyers are initiating quotes online and the quote generation and order capture is actually taking place offline.

The biggest optimization mistake that we have seen over the years is using the wrong success metric. And if you’re only measuring online goals, clicks and leads, that can lead to inefficient spend in your paid media campaigns and wasted activity and low quality leads from your website experimentation and optimization.

A solution on the paid media side is ultimately being able to adjust your bids based on those offline conversions. And for your website, assessing the results of experiments and making decisions based on those down funnel conversions.

channel optimization

Google Analytics is often the source of this analysis and decision making. By default Google Analytics is only tracking individual onsite activity. How traffic gets to the site, the bounce rates, page views, etc. Even the goal conversions typically stop at the form completion (on-site).

Google Analytics is great at digesting paid media campaign information website activity, and linking to ad platforms like Google Ads. But the majority of your offline conversion information is happening in different systems. Marketing automation platforms, CRM, or maybe a quote and order management solution.

To solve this we need to integrate those directly into Google Analytics. By doing so we can actually see those offline conversions, like marketing, qualified leads, opportunities, revenue as goals directly in Google Analytics and even evaluate the performance of campaigns, channels, landing pages, everything else in Google Analytics by down funnel goals like closed won revenue.

Backend integration to GA

offline goals in GA 2022-02-07

So here are the main requirements to accomplish this integration:

  1. Understand the important identifiers that Google Analytics uses and store them in your backend platforms.
  2. Capture those offline conversions from those backend systems.
  3. Translating them into the identities and events that Google Analytics expects.
  4. Send  hits to Google Analytics via the offline API known as the Measurement Protocol.

full GA integration

Let’s start by understanding the identifiers that Google Analytics uses.

Here, I’m going focus on Universal Analytics. GA4 (Google Analytics 4) is still being rolled out as at the time of this post. A lot of the concepts in GA4 are very different. So we’re still very focused on Universal Analytics.

First off, Universal Analytics has a Tracking ID. This identifies the account and property that you’re going to be sending hits to. If you log into the Google Analytics interface, you’ll be able to see that Tracking ID. You can also retrieve it using JavaScript from the browser.

The second identifier that we care about is the Client ID. This identifies a device or browser. It’s automatically set by the Google Analytics script, persisted in a cookie on the browser and has a predefined structure.

GA tracking id client id

The final identifier is the User ID. This is less commonly used in these use cases. But it is important to understand because this lets you identify an individual user on the site. Unlike the prior two IDs, this is actually set by a site owner, typically post authentication, where the user might be logging in with multiple devices, to identify an individual user and as such it has no predefined structure.

Importantly, when you send offline hits to Google Analytics, you need to include the Tracking ID and either the Client ID or the User ID. So the approach that we’re going to take is to store these identifiers alongside the lead in your backend solution.

And really, there are two options here. If you only care about individual goals and you only care about the Google Analytics tracking, you can store that Google Analytics Tracking ID and Client ID directly in your backend platform.

The second option, which we use at FunnelEnvy and gives us a little bit more flexibility across different implementations and other identifiers that we have to track is to actually capture those GA identifiers, the Tracking ID and Client ID in the browser, and associate them with another Visitor ID that we set as a cookie. Then we store that single ID, that Visitor ID in the backend platform and translate it when we’re setting those hits to GA.

To actually send them to the backend platform, you can populate the IDs that you’re going to use as hidden input fields on the form. When the lead submits that form, the GA identifiers will be saved in your backend platform.

This is relatively straight forward to do in platforms like Salesforce, Marketo or HubSpot, in which you can create custom fields or properties in that backend platform. And then populate with hidden fields in the forms using JavaScript. We commonly do this using Google Tag Manager.

storing GA identifiers in backend

The second step then is capturing the offline conversions that are happening in those backend platforms. The first thing you have to do is identify the offline goals that you care about. If you’re doing demand generation, it’s typically marketing, qualified leads or sales qualified leads at an individual level.

New opportunities closed won revenue, are very common, and if you’re generating offline orders, the generation of the quote or the order itself.

The most common way that we actually capture these offline conversions is triggering a webhook from the source platform for each offline conversion. A webhook is simply an HTTP request that’s made to our system.

Again, these webhooks will have to include the Google Analytics IDs that you’re storing on the backend, or the visitor ID, if you’re taking that approach. And importantly, where you do have an amount, like an opportunity value, a closed won value, an order value, you want to include that because you’ll be able to send that as well to Google Analytics in either the event or order that you’ll be submitting.

Now you can configure webhooks very simply in a variety of these solutions. HubSpot has workflows with webhooks, Marketo natively supports webhooks. In Salesforce, you can code webhooks in Apex or use an application like the Hooked app to visually create workflows and webhooks. Now for some reason you can’t create a webhook as an alternative you can poll through the API or directly from a database.

webhook options hubspot, marketo, salesforce

Once you’ve captured the offline conversions, you’re going toto translate those into the format and the identities that Google Analytics understands. If you’re storing the Google Analytics Tracking ID and Client ID directly in the backend, and you only care about those individual goal conversions, that you don’t really need to do any identity translation. The identity is encapsulated within that Tracking ID and Client ID.

If, however, you are storing the visitor ID then you’ll translate that into the relevant Google Analytics IDs. And if you are tracking account level goals, like opportunities, deals, or revenue at an account level, then you’re going to need to translate your account to all of the contacts that you have available. To do this you’re probably going to need to pull some kind of account to contact mapping from your CRM.

The following diagram illustrates this. For an individual goal, like MQL, you can web hook that directly from the CRM into Google Analytics. Just get the Tracking ID and Client ID and send that on a one-to-one basis to Google Analytics. But if you are sending an account level goal, there’s another step involved of pulling the account to contact or individual mapping, then translating account identifiers into contact IDs, and then into Google Analytics Tracking IDs so that you can send those offline hits to Google Analytics.

individual vs account goals

What you’re really going to want to do is identify all of those offline conversions and then map those to the types of hits that you’ll be sending to Google Analytics through the Measurement Protocol. You’ll want to identify the type, whether that’s account or individual.

Typically for demand generation type of scenarios we use events as the hit type whereas for e-commerce we use orders. As part of this mapping you can identify the relevant fields in those hits and make sure you’re accounting for all of them, including the value, which can be either an actual value coming from the offline conversion or predicted value if you can do that.

map offline conversions

The final step is actually sending those hits to Google Analytics. So for this again, we’re going to use the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol. This is an offline API to be able to send hits directly to the GA servers over HTTP. Now Google Analytics includes a pretty helpful tool that allows you to build and test those offline Measurement Protocol hits.

measurement protocol hit builder examples

So here you can see an example of an event and the event structure that’s sent to Google Analytics. As well as an enhanced e-commerce purchase example that you might use for an offline e-commerce order.

If you are sending event hits, then you’ll want to create a goal of type event so that the goal is triggered on the offline event hit that you’re sending to GA. And if you are sending an event value along with that measurement protocol hit, you’ll want to set the goal value as the event value.

GA goal setup

Unfortunately the measurement protocol has been abused over the years by bots. In the view settings Google Analytics has the ability to block bots. We’ve seen that if you leave the IP address blank, and don’t set an IP address on that Measurement Protocol hit you’re more likely to get that traffic blocked as bot traffic. So we typically recommend setting the IP address of the hit to the same visitor IP that initiated the prior session (that submitted the form), and send that along with your Measurement Protocol hit.

The other thing that you can do that’s really helpful is set a custom dimension along with those measurement protocol hits. One example is to send the buyer stage. So if the visitor is an MQL, if they have an active opportunity, send that as along as a dimension to Google Analytics so you can further segment that traffic and understand what they’re doing on site.

And then finally you can backdate hits, but only up to four hours reliably using the queue time parameter. What that practically means is you can’t expect to send hits days or weeks in the past, you need to be pretty on top of it and this process needs to be running relatively frequently because you can really only backdate those hits by four hours.

I want to spend a little bit of time talking about attribution. By default, the measurement protocol hits that are going to be sent are, will attributed to the direct channel in a new session. The default reporting in Google Analytics uses the last click non-direct attribution model for reporting.

Practically, what that means is that when that conversion comes over offline from the Measurement Protocol, it’s going to be in a new session. But the conversion will actually be attributed to the prior non-direct channel.

So to visualize this that let’s say we have a visitor coming along, hitting the site, viewing a few pages and then submitting a form, and that visitor came in from a paid search ad. When we send over the offline conversion, that’s going to generate a new session which by default it will be attributed to the direct channel. So the conversion is actually going to be attributed to the prior session’s (paid search).

offline conversion attribution in GA

I want to wrap this up with some final thoughts. To be able to track these offline conversions and associate them to marketing campaigns, as well as website experience, you don’t need an entirely new tech stack. You can use Google Analytics in the same way that you have. You just have to integrate the data into it.

As I mentioned the number one mistake that we see when doing optimization of any kind is picking the wrong success metric. And without measuring these meaningful outcomes, optimization experimentation, things like segmentation and personalization are really just vanity exercises.

With these offline conversions, however, you can optimize your bidding through your ad platform, for example, by linking Google Analytics and Google Ads and triggering goal conversions that occur from offline events. And you can optimize your experiences, most importantly, your offers and your form experiences that are most likely to have an impact on those down funnel KPIs.

Finally, if you do have a long sales cycle and a relatively low volume of revenue conversions, you can take this a step further. You can actually take a more frequent, upstream conversion and use a predictive model to predict revenue and optimize faster. As we see from the table below, more frequent conversions (a higher number of conversions in a certain time period), in Google Ads will actually allow the algorithm to optimize faster. So sending along a predicted revenue value with your MQLs can allow that algorithm to optimize traffic much faster, while those down-funnel actual closed won revenue conversions are coming in.

google ads impact of conversion volume

By |2022-02-07T15:05:30-08:00February 7th, 2022|Analytics, The Funnel, B2B|0 Comments
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