B2B companies that want to generate leads and boost their growth often turn to reporting tools for accurate feedback and data collection. Google Analytics is one of the major industry standards for tracking, analyzing, and reporting site data. The current W3Tech survey shows that 56.8 percent of all surveyed websites use Google Analytics, which a market share of 85.6 percent for web traffic analysis tools.
Google Analytics can play a major role in developing an online marketing strategy, especially for B2B sales. It allows users to understand group behavior and adapt their sales solutions to target potential clients. This article discusses seven techniques that will help B2B businesses get the most out of Google Analytics.
Table of Contents
1. Content Drilldown
Effective marketing requires a business to know more about their prospective customers than just demographic information. They must also understand how visitors to a website interact with its content. This information includes knowing where a visitor came from, the type of content they prefer and what they do on the website. The answers to these questions are vital for improving lead generation.
A Content Drilldown report in Google Analytics provides details about user behavior, which provides insight into content quality. Google Analytics users can access this report in the Behavior section by selecting Site Content and then Content Drilldown. This report lists the most visited pages along with website metrics that are typically important to businesses such as bounce rates and time spent on each page. Users can narrow the focus of the Drilldown report by adding a search category such as “products,” which will include only pages with product information.
User Flow reports also provide information on visitor engagement in Google Analytics. These reports provide information on where visitors came from and where they went after visiting the landing page. This information is especially important in ecommerce analytics because it helps to explain why some visitors avoid registration forms and product pages on their journey through a website.
User Flow reports may also identify technical problems in the content. A professional editor or services like Grammarly can help improve content quality, which encourages visitors to stay on a page longer.
2. Event Tracking
The primary objective of event tracking is to analyze how users interact with a page, rather than simply measuring conversions. Events that Google Analytics can track include clicking calls-to-action (CTAs), downloading documents, writing comments or simply reading content.
Interaction with video content is becoming a popular method of analyzing visitor behavior, especially during the last few years. Google Analytics can track video interaction, although duplicate events should be discounted. Visitors may replay a video multiple times, but it’s more important to know the number of visitors who saw the video than the number of times it was viewed. However, a video that’s been replayed many times by a few visitors clearly appeals to them, so businesses should consider meeting this demand with more videos that have similar content.
Event tracking also provides information on content creation that can help make that content a more effective marketing tool. Assume, for example, that a web page has a podcast with a CTA to visit a specific URL that isn’t mentioned anywhere else on the website. This will ensure that anyone using the CTA has done so because they heard it on the podcast. If Google Analytics event tracking shows that many visitors have listened to the podcast, but only a few of them used the CTA, it may mean that listeners aren’t able to focus on this audio format quickly enough. This would suggest that the podcasts should contain multiple CTAs throughout, instead of just one CTA at the end.
3. Demographics Analysis
The basic nature of buyers and their habits generally remains the same, whether they’re buying online or in a physical store. Online marketers must understand the demographic segmentation of their prospective customers to ensure their website content matches their traits.
Demographics analysis helps B2B marketers ensure their content meets the needs of their target audience. For example, marketers can obtain demographic information when visitors respond to a CTA such as downloading a white paper or requesting a free trial. Marketers can then use B2B Google Analytics metrics to generate leads and target new market segments.
This process allows users to obtain valuable insights from personal information that visitors have left on a webpage. The most common strategies for obtaining this information include requiring visitors to register before they can download documents or subscribe to a mailing list. The information with the greatest value depends on the business, but a visitor’s geographic location, age and gender are typically important to marketers. The following data on a visitor’s business is also important for meeting Google Analytics goals in B2B marketing:
- Business size
- Industry
- Number of employees
- Products
- Annual turnover
4. Conversion Funnel
Marketers often need to visualize their conversion funnel when presenting information on their website performance to other stakeholders. Google Analytics reports on conversion funnels measure conversion rate at each stage in the customer’s journey towards a purchase, allowing marketers to identify shortcomings in the funnel.
Funnel visualization helps marketers analyze the performance of each segment on the website, including its individual elements. Assume for this example that a marketer wants to analyze a website’s blog page. Funnel reports can provide the average conversion rate for all blog posts. Furthermore, they can measure the conversion for each topic that’s discussed in the blog.
The Match Type option in the Google Analytics navigation pane allows the user to obtain this information. For example, a search of all pages containing the phrase “/product_reviews” in their URL could allow a marketer to analyze the performance of the product review pages on the website. However, analyzing a particular page would require the marketer to search for a link containing the name of the product for that page. The search strategy allows marketers to identify and improve product pages that are performing poorly.
5. Segmentation
The segmentation of website visitors by traffic source is a useful indicator of their off-site behavior. Marketers need to follow visitor segmentation to increase website traffic, which they can do with User Flow. This capability provides a highly segmented view of customer journeys to determine how they reached the website.
The User Flow piece of Google Analytics provides a list of traffic sources such web searches. Most of the traffic to a website comes from search engine results, although marketers who wish to increase the SEO value of their sites need to further distinguish between free and paid searches. Videos are also becoming an increasingly common way for visitors to arrive at a website, especially video reviews on YouTube.
Traffic sources also include affiliates, which may warrant additional investment when they perform better than expected. Inbound links are another way for visitors to reach a site, especially when it belongs to a true industry leader. The growing size of social networks makes social media an increasingly effective traffic source. Email campaigns have been in use for decades, but they’re still highly efficient sales drivers. Visitors who access sites through direct traffic are often loyal customers.
6. Visitor Behavior
Google Analytics can track visitor behavior in other ways such as distinguishing between first-time visitors and returning visitors, which can help determine the number of loyal customers a business has. This information also allows marketers to develop a strategy for bringing in more new visitors, typically during a marketing campaign.
Furthermore, Google Analytics can correlate user behavior with web traffic. Google Analytics can identify the browsers and devices visitors are using, including details such as operating system and screen resolution that allow marketers to further optimize their content. It also has a filter that shows the visitors to a website within a specific time period, which allows users to monitor website popularity over time.
7. Goal Flow
The ultimate purpose of a marketing website is to convince visitors to either provide leads or directly buy products or service. This process requires marketers to understand how visitors navigate through the website, which is where the Google Analytics Goal Report is useful.
This report summarizes how visitors end their journey on a website, which is typically a CTA that requires visitors to provide more information about themselves. CTAs can include an inquiry, download or subscription to additional content, each of which has a specific objective that a Goal Flow report can measure. Visitors need to perform multiple steps before fulfilling a goal, and the Goal Flow report can help optimize their navigation through the conversion funnel.
Takeaways
B2B businesses need a measurement tool like Google Analytics to develop a data-driven marketing strategy. Google Analytics lead generation capabilities include the following:
- Content drilldown
- Event tracking
- Demographics analysis
- Conversion funnel
- Segmentation
- Visitor behavior
- Goal flow
Competition in this space is becoming fiercer, necessitating B2B companies to use Google Analytics goals and metrics more effectively. Maintaining long-term profitability in B2B relations requires a precise, proactive approach to meeting marketing goals.
How Can Ballantine Help You Use Google Analytics?
Ballantine has been helping businesses in the U.S. implement digital marketing initiatives since 1966. We are a family owned and operated business currently in our third generation.
We always have new ideas and approaches to digital marketing, but we maintain our vision of providing personalized attention and delivering strategies that contribute to our client’s success. Give us a call at 973-305-1500 or contact us to learn more about how we can help you use Google Analytics to grow your business.
I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
![The Roadmap to Effective B2B Marketing [Infographic]](https://www.ballantine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/71131_Ballantine-Featured-Blog-Image_Option-4_032917.png "The Roadmap to Effective B2B Marketing [Infographic]")
