In this guide, you will discover how to begin your journey of using enriched company data in Google Analytics (GA) to drive more revenue with less budget.
Introduction
It's widely accepted GA is a poor tool for B2B marketing teams. Why is this? GA only shows individual users with volume based (quantitative aka a bunch of numbers) metrics. This offers no context or insights into the quality of website traffic.
There is also typically more than one person involved in B2B purchasing decisions and individuals often change devices or clear cookies across multiple visits. GA has no way of tying this information together to create meaningful reporting on buyers journeys for B2B.
The result is incomplete insights into marketing initiatives that are actually driving revenue. Leading to wasted budget and investment in actions that don't contribute to topline business goals.
To help marketers get back in the driving seat, the integration with GA enriches sessions (UA) or events (GA4) with company information such as industry, size and domain in real-time.
This enables you to see a complete picture of how your target buyer persona's find and engage with your website. Leading to better budget utilisation and the ability to optimise marketing programs for revenue generation.
💡 The Google Analytics Enricher works with both Universal Analytics and GA4.
What do you need to get started?
Let's dive in with an Ideal Customer Profile Segment.
As with almost all good marketing activities, the starting point is defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). For the purpose of the guide we will call this a Target Company Profile.
Through the lens of the Target Company Profile (TCP) we can filter existing reports, build dashboards and audiences. The top-line goal is to learn how our TCP behaves differently from regular visitors to answer some of the following questions.
👉 What ads, channels or sources drive the most target visitors relative to budget?
👉 Which pages on your website do they bounce or exit the most on?
👉 Which pages do they view the most?
👉 Which pages do they spend the most time on?
👉 What are the most common journeys they take?
💡 If you have further divided your ICP into distinct subcategories we recommend creating multiple TCP Segments and a single overarching one for topline reporting.
1️⃣ Navigate to any report - let's say Audience => Overview => Add Segment
2️⃣ Add a New Segment
3️⃣ Name your Segment => Advanced Conditions => Select e.g. Company Industry => Save
4️⃣ You will be able to see your new overview report.
Looking at the example above, we can see that our Target Company Profile group interacts and engages better with the website except for Avg. Session duration.
Better than this, when we look at new vs returning users, we can see a much higher proportion of TCP users returning to the website.
However, the total percentage of ICP users visiting our website is lower than we would like. Especially since the initial results indicate if we did a better job of driving them to our website, they engage more and have a much higher likelihood of returning.
This leads us to investigate our sources to see which perform better or worse at attracting target visitors.
💡 If you would like to take your analysis a step further, create another Segment that excludes ICP users to assess how the two groups behave differently from one another.
Adding behavior to a Target Company Profile
Before we take a look into using the Segment in different reports to generate insights. Let's create a few more by adding behavior into the mix. Think of Segments as saved snapshots that you would like to filter reports with or build audiences from.
1️⃣ Copy your Segment.
2️⃣ Add behavior on top of your ICP filters and save.
💡 We use goals for each Segment. This enables us to map how our ICP moves through each stage of our funnel or buyer's journey. We also use them to create retargeting Audiences from each stage.
Applying segments
With the Segments in place, you can analyse your marketing performance by Target Company Profile.
We like to start with the Rule of 5.
👉 The 5 best sources (ads, channels etc) for Target Companies
👉 The 5 worst sources
👉 The 5 most visited pages
👉 The 5 most engaged with pages
👉 The 5 most exited pages
With this information, you can begin to optimise on-site, paid and organic marketing programs by re-allocating budget to better performers and taking actions to ensure target company visitors find the content you know they engage with.
Acquisition
Which campaigns, channels and ads attract a higher percentage of ICP visitors relative to the budget you invest in them?
Are there sources that attract a proportionally small percentage of ICP visitors? If so, what is the budget spend on them, is it proportional to the amount of ICP visitors? Is there high engagement from the few ICP visitors they do drive? If not, pull the budget and put it into new tests or existing top performers.
What is the engagement from ICP visitors like by source? Are there sources that attract a high number of target visitors but also have a proportionally high bounce rate from the same group?
💡 If there are, we look into our landing page performance by ICP to see if we can replace the poorly performing page. Or make changes to increase engagement with inspiration from top performers.
From an organic perspective, you will know what keywords content ranks for. This enables you to asses the keywords by the amount of ICP visitors they drive.
We aim for a balance between driving traffic volume and quality, which in turn forms our content plan and the keywords we aim to rank for. Enabling us to ensure our SEO strategy drives revenue and not just volume.
Content / On-site performance
What content or pages does your ICP audience view the most, spend the most time consuming and return to?
The answers to these questions are particularly valuable and at times a little disheartening. Realising a piece of content you thought was going to blow the socks off of our target audience actually performs better with an audience that's not going to buy from you can be painful.
Thankfully the road to optimisation is in the same data.
👉 Do the 5 most visited pages by Target Company Profile link to (preferably obviously) the 5 pages or pieces of content they engage with the most?
👉 Can you make quick win changes to the 5 pages the TCP exits from the most to keep them on the site a little longer by taking inspiration from the 5 top performers?
💡 Once we have a clear understanding of the content and page types our TCP engages with the most, we double down on creating more of them.
Referral sources
Are you paying for referrals or backlinks? Running co-marketing programs with other companies?
Track your referral sources by ICP visitors to make informed decisions on how monetary or resource investments translate into visitors that will turn into customers.
If you want to take it a step further (which we recommend), compare the referral source to other traffic source e.g. paid ads. If the ROI is higher on other sources, then you are better off moving your budget there and looking for new referrals or co-marketing partners that drive better quality visitors.
Buyer's journey (goals)
Chances are you already have a buyer's journey and goals in GA. If you don't, we highly recommend getting goals set up to track the progress of visitors against target objectives.
There are varying opinions on creating a visitor funnel and or a defined buyers journey. We believe as website visitors engage more with your website, the likelihood of them converting increases. This doesn't end when the sales cycle begins, since prospects will continue to consume content and interact with your ads.
💡 Through analysing vast quantities of data, we have come to understand that there are key moments (pieces of content) in this engagement journey that serve to push visitors through to the next stage.
We also discovered visitors from different types of companies follow different paths as their priorities and interests are vary. For example, security is a big concern for a large Financial Service organisation. Whereas, a small software company is less concerned with security and prioritises the amount of resources it's going to take to see an ROI.
With this in mind, look into your top performing sources and content by ICP and plot a buyers journey for your ICP. Then create goals for each stage of the journey of the moments that matter.
In our case, conversion was the 5th goal in a series of 10, which in turn allowed us to track the % of ICP visitors that converted (even when they used a Gmail address), ensuring that quality over volume is emphasized.
It also makes it possible for to understand the impact an X% improvement in any of the stages will have on your end goal.
With this setup you can track the progress of ICP visitors through your buyers journey. Do they repeatedly hit the moments that matter? Or are they dropping off before you have the chance to convince them to stick around?
💡 Potential fixes may include retargeting programs, on-site optimization or website personalisation.
Once you have a strong understanding of what drives different types of companies to engage and convert, the next step is setting up website personalization with Spotter API. This will ensure your target visitors are served the right content at the right time.
If you would like to build custom dashboards and or merge data with other sources, check out the guide to Supercharge Google Data Studio.
💡 We are currently beginning to forecast sales using this method. Allowing us to understand well ahead of time if there is going to be enough in the pipeline to hit target before visitors convert. We then know if need to pick up the volume or make a quality fix to stay on track.
As always, feel free to drop us a message with any comments, ideas, questions or just to say howdy. Team Snitcher signing off 👋