• The Role of Web Analytics in Demand Generation

    December 8, 2010

    Posted in: Uncategorized

    Transparency in marketing is a popular notion, but I have to admit, it was a bit intimidating the first time I presented web traffic statistics and my lead summary report to the CEO. Frankly, the second time was even worse when I knew he had time to digest the prior week’s report and ask more detailed questions. I knew the discussion was about marketing ROI and was concerned about justifying my existence, but what followed turned out to be about much more.

    His mandate was unambiguous – report on the business achievements from marketing, not on activities or program status. I used web traffic, visitor behavior, lead conversions and lead scoring to evaluate marketing execution and the sales pipeline. But, we quickly realized the bigger picture — we were now looking at the business as a whole through a different looking glass, and one constructed by the response of our target audience to what we thought they wanted to hear.

    We started looking at visits and page views to see what messages were working to drive traffic, but new questions came up. Did our product roadmap align with visitor interest? Were our visitor roles who we thought they would be? What information were different visitor segments searching for on the website? What constituted a high quality website visit? Product management got involved when the conversation moved past program execution because it was their value proposition we started to question. When the discussion moved to what constituted a high quality lead, Sales piped in.

    My point is this: when Demand Generation opened the proverbial kimono to web and pipeline data, we stepped out of assuming the role of smartest guy in the room and we opened the conversation across teams about how to improve business results – which is the charter you hear a lot of pundits talk about for marketing. Often, we didn’t have answers to questions, but we knew how to evaluate website traffic and we could slice and dice visitor traffic for insights. Clearly we still owned the task of improving marketing ROI, but now we had a more extensive dialog than “how many leads came in this week” and a more substantial role than providing program status in response.

    The best part, we had one set of numbers to debate, and we didn’t need to leave the office for new data points. They were right in front of us on our Google Analytics dashboard. We had another way to listen to our target audience.

    Here’s what I mean. By emphasizing the value of listening and responding to our target market, the newer marketing tactics around social media and email change give us a sounding board. Web and “revenue analytics” help marketers extend the learning we are gaining from social media with observations gleaned from visitor reaction to our campaigns and their behavior on our web pages.

    Why is this important? Because web analytics makes it possible to develop correlations between visitor behavior and future revenue. Just as important, it helps deconstruct aggregate behavior to allow us to form actionable intelligence on geographic, product and demographic segments.

    For worldwide demand generation programs, the need to localize and coordinate campaigns globally has always been recognized. Now, tools like Google Analytics open the door to a deeper understanding of the business and the entire web presence in much higher fidelity than what was possible just a few years ago. So the debate about Marketing ROI doesn’t need to be confined to lead quantity and quality. It can open up an opportunity for a much more revealing conversation about the state of the company through the target customers’ looking glass.

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