How to use GA4 with company data from Snitcher

In this guide, you will discover how to use Snitcher enriched company data in Google Analytics (GA4).

The top line goal is to help you generate more revenue through marketing activities without increasing budget. This is done by improving the number of quality conversions and visits 📈

It's widely acknowledged GA4 is a poor tool for B2B marketing teams.

Why is this though?

GA4 only shows individual users with volume based metrics. This offers no context or insights on the quality of website traffic that paid and organic initiatives drive.

To add to this, more than one person is typically involved in a B2B buying decision. People often change devices or clear cookies across multiple visits and GA4 has no way of tying this information together. Leading to an inability to create meaningful reporting on buyers journeys for B2B.

The result is poor attribution and limited insights into which marketing initiatives actually drive engagement with target audiences. Resulting in wasted budget and investment in actions that don't contribute to topline business goals.

To help marketers get back in the driving seat, Snitcher enriches GA4 events with company information such as industry, size and name.

This enables you to see a complete picture of how your target audience finds and engages with your website. Leading to more effective budget allocation and the ability to optimise marketing programs for revenue generation.

As with all good marketing activities, the starting point is defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

The attributes of your ICP are inputted into GA4 using a Segment, from which you can build an Audience.

Through the lens of the ICP Audience, you can filter existing reports and build dashboards.

The goal is to learn how your ICP finds and engages with your website to answer the following questions:

👉 Which ads, channels and campaigns drive the most target visitors relative to budget?

👉 What organic content drives the most target visitors?

👉 Which pages on your website do ICP visitors bounce or exit from the most?

👉 Which pages do they view the most?

👉 Which pages do they spend the most time on?

👉 What are the most common journeys they take?

Additionally the ICP Audience is used for retargeting across Search and Display and to build lookalike Audiences.

Within most B2B businesses there are certain company types that can't or won't become customers. For example, companies with less than 200 employees or specific industries such as higher education.

The goal of creating an Exclusion Audience is to discover which paid or organic sources drive particularly high volumes of traffic that is not valuable. Using this information you can optimise marketing programs and ensure you are investing resources in activities that result in bottom line revenue.

With Exclusion Audience's, it's possible exclude bad fit visitors from being shown ads in the future and prevent them from being enrolled in retargeting programs.

The benefit of these initiatives is dual fold:

👉 helps to train Google algorithm (think offline conversions without the conversion)

👉 save advertising budget

Once the Audiences are built, you can begin analysing your marketing performance. This is done by applying comparisons to reports.

To get started with the logic used to find insights using comparisons in GA4 there are few practical examples below to get started with.

The goal of running a traffic acquisition report comparison is to answer the following questions (and more).

👉 Which sources, channels, campaigns etc are performing the best at driving ICP traffic relative to the amount of budget spent on them?

👉 Which sources, channels, campaigns etc are performing the worst at driving ICP traffic relative to the amount of budget spent on them?

👉 How can I decrease the cost per quality conversion?

👉 How can I drive more quality traffic?

The methodology below can be applied at a more granular level depending on what you would like to find insights on.

For instance you can compare Paid Search Terms, Referral Sources or Topic Clusters.

How do campaigns, channels and ads perform relative to the budget you invest in them?

The top line goal of answering this question is to drive a higher number of ICP visitors to the website. Resulting in more quality conversions without needing to drastically increase spend.

Depending on source performance in terms of driving ICP visitors and how engaged visitors are once they hit the website, budget can can be efficiently allocated. While there are sources that bring in a high number of visitors, it's important to constantly ask yourself, is it worth the budget you’re spending on them?

To illustrate the concept and how decisions can be made based on the data provided, the table below summarises the Traffic Acquisition report and includes budget allocation.

Check the budget allocated to each source and compare it to the amount of ICP visitors driven. From there, select sources that will give you the most bang for your buck 🎆

It's clear the majority of budget is allocated to Paid Search. While Paid Search is responsible for driving the highest number of ICP visitors, both Organic and Referral sources far outperform it relative to budget allocation.

In addition to volume, it’s essential to measure the engagement from the ICP visitors sources are driving. If the engagement rate is particularly low, it’s time to investigate the pages these visitors are landing on and their journey paths past this point. Then reconsider the budget you’re spending on that particular source for driving ICP visitors.

Once again it's clear that Organic Search and Referrals are the best performers at engaging visitors and holding their attention. This in turn provides the highest probability of conversion.

Through analysing both the volume and engagement of ICP visitors by source, you will have a clear picture of how your marketing dollars perform.

For example, Organic Search consumes only 10% of the budget but is responsible for driving 28% of the ICP visits across the 3 sources. Paid Search on the other hand drives 51% of ICP visits and consumes 75% of the budget.

With this information you should consider re-allocating spend from sources driving a comparatively small percentage of ICP relative to what you invest in them. By doing this, you can use the freed up budget on sources driving higher percentages of quality ICP visitors or reinforce the budget of existing top performers.

Continuing with the example, Paid Search budget should be re-allocated toward Organic and Referral. Keep in mind, results can take time, especially from Organic, so it's wise to reallocate the budget incrementally and continually assess the impact of the change.

Once again the goal is to answer a number of questions that will provide insights on the behaviour of ICP visitors.

👉 What pages to ICP users visit the most and does this match up with the most visited pages by all users?

👉 Are their specific pages that ICP visitors frequently exit from?

👉 Which pages do ICP visitors spend the most time on and does this match all users?

You may prefer working from the Landing Page report. Additionally, setting up content groups in GA4 will enable you to bucket content into logical groups that can be compared against different audiences.

What content or pages does your ICP audience view the most, spend the most time on and exit from the most from?

The topline goal of answering these questions is to engage and retain ICP visitors on the website for longer while ensuring they find content that resonates with them. Leading to more quality conversions.

By analyzing pages ICP users visit and spend time on, you can optimise poorly performing pages with inspiration from top performers. While ensuring regularly visited pages contain everything visitors need to continue their journey or convert.

Using the simplified table below we can outline how to go about this process.

When analyzing pages by ICP there are a few things to keep in mind. What sources and pages are directing traffic to the page being examined? What is the quality of traffic that sources such as ads are driving onto the page?

Before making changes to the page, it's a good idea to answer both of these questions as it may not be the page itself that's performing badly but rather the sources.

It's clear the API and Pricing pages attract a higher proportion of ICP traffic. They also drive a higher number and % of ICP conversions. Lastly, the total traffic visiting these pages is lower than the Lead Gen page.

Another important factor to consider when analyzing page performance is the amount of time ICP visitors spend on the page.

Low engagement rates indicate that while lot's of ICP visitors are finding the page, it's not resonating with them. So they are either exiting the website or moving on to a different page in search of the information they need.

It's worth comparing engagement rates of non ICP visitors vs ICP visitors. You may discover pages that traditionally engaged visitors poorly resonate highly with specific subsets of visitors. Consider also running comparisons using single company types rather than the entire ICP audience to analyze if content written for specific audiences actually works.

Once again, both the Pricing and API pages perform better than the Lead Gen page from both an engagement and conversion perspective. This in turn means that the next step is to consider how to send more ICP traffic to these pages.

Now that the data points towards the API and Pricing pages performing best with ICP visitors it's time to consider how this information can be used to improve page performance and optimize on site performance to retain visitors on the site for longer in order to drive more conversions.

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. 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.

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?

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.

You can also use our data to retarget and exclude companies with your LinkedIn ads. Check out this guide to see how it's done - LinkedIn Ads Guide

As always, feel free to drop us a message with any comments, ideas, questions or just to say howdy. Team Snitcher signing off 👋