Sometimes the ‘safe’ marketing investment turns out to be a sink. Sometimes there’s untapped potential in a growing traffic source. Knowledge of your own data allows for more informed opinions and offers insights into the effectiveness of your status quo and the best next steps. Whether you’re an ecommerce powerhouse or a local B2B, each tactic of your marketing strategy should have a method of proving its value, and you won’t need to be a statistician to pull it off.

First, Know What Goals to Track

To avoid analysis paralysis, track only the online behaviors which lead to business opportunity or directly support further marketing efforts and lead nurturing. While you can track items such as page depth and time-on-site as a goal, these are more effective of ad-revenue driven online publications. For most B2B websites, contact submission forms, email signups, whitepaper downloads and even clicks on email links can and should be counted as individual goals. For analysis’ sake, a goal is anything which can be directly or indirectly attributed to lead generation for your business. If your forms and email signups have dedicated ‘thank you’ pages with unique URLs, you can setup a Google Analytics Destination goal. Otherwise, consult your web developer for event or virtual page view support. If much of your business is via phone calls from your website and you’re running advertising campaigns, consider a click-to-call tracking solution such as CallRail. CallRail will automatically replace the phone number on your website for select traffic sources, such as search advertisements or an industry directory, with a toll-free or local line. These systems will then connect incoming calls back to Google Analytics, allowing you to effectively track incoming phone calls generated from digital marketing efforts. Special bonus: CallRail also adds the connectivity with Salesforce, call recording and some other value-adds.

Second, Determine and Apply Business Value to each Goal

If you’re lucky enough to be a marketer with an ecommerce powered business, tracking dollars is pretty straight forward. This doesn’t mean that the majority of B2B websites that aren’t ecommerce are without hope. By default, Google Analytics simply counts goals. Your report for the month might say “150 Product Information Contact Form Completions. However, you can add an additional layer of ‘value,’ to this to help gauge these goals for their ability to generate revenue. Let’s say that your sales team typically closes 20% of all leads coming in through your contact form and that your average customer value is $1,000. When configuring Google Analytics goals for your form, you can also add an optional ‘value’ field. In this case it’s the close rate multiplied by transaction value, 0.2 x $1000 for a goal value of $200 per form completion. This ‘inferred revenue’ isn’t perfect, but it can help in evaluating specific marketing actions by allowing Google Analytics to estimate returns on your investment. If, for example, you’ve purchased a sponsorship in an industry newsletter to place your product or service, this tactic will let you get a sense of the traffic coming in through that link in the ‘Campaigns’ report of Google Analytics, as well as close rate, number of leads and estimated revenue. Be sure to re-evaluate your estimated value regularly.

Third, Think Long Term

Many B2B buying cycles are long, and a conversion on first interaction is rare. Multi-channel attribution will allow you to see website user touch points over time, allowing you a holistic view of each channel and campaign’s ability to help a potential customer along in their journey to a website conversion. Learn more about multi-channel conversion funnels from Google. This information can be combined with attributed goal value. Looking for a marketing partner to help you identify, track and optimize your goals and campaigns? wedü is here to help. Contact us today.