In an era when on-the-go consumers use multiple devices to look for, learn about and ultimately buy a product either online or in a bricks-and-mortar store, it can be tough for marketers to know specifically what they’re doing right or wrong to achieve the most profitable outcome.
That’s why InfoTrust engineers developed the Analyze.ly data transfer platform a few years ago. We wanted to help our clients integrate different data sources and advertising networks with Google Analytics. We gave clients side-by-side comparison of data, enabling them to better comprehend things like ad costs and conversions.
Pelican Water Systems
Our experience with Pelican Water Systems is a terrific example. As described in a 2016 blog post by Michael Loban, CMO at InfroTrust, Pelican sells its water purification systems via its website and via a call center. However, the company was unable to tie online marketing channels to the offline sales placed via a call center. Pelican lacked a complete picture of the customer journey.
Together, Pelican and InfoTrust implemented Google Analytics to enhance the sales attribution and probe deeper into the shopping styles of customers. The main challenge that the two noticed was that some customers would see online ads and purchase online, while others would call customer service representatives to complete their orders (offline). Compared to the online campaigns, 0% of the offline sales were attributed to online marketing campaigns.
To address this, InfoTrust used the Google Analytics User ID feature. A unique User ID was carried across Google Analytics, DialogTech and Salesforce.com to identify online visitors and associate their online and offline activity. The Measurement Protocol was used to upload all offline order information (e.g. products sold, revenue, tax, etc.) to Google Analytics.
With Google Analytics, Pelican got better reports to understand which of its orders offline were being generated by marketing campaigns online. Loban wrote that this led to the discovery that up to 15% of overall conversions placed offline were influenced by different AdWords campaigns. With this discovery, Pelican Water Systems had ability to budget and plan its campaigns accurately.
“Offline transactions which had 0% visibility and were dependent solely on inaccurate or incorrect customer feedback are now fully attributable to their proper marketing channel. This allows us to make quick, smart decisions on trends across all forms of marketing, both online and offline, and how consumers jump from desktop to mobile and office computers,” said Robert Prentice, Pelican’s director of marketing and product development. (Click here to read the whole case study.)
It gets better.
Now we’ve enhanced Analyze.ly with eCommerce data upload capability. This is important because uploading offline e-commerce transactions to Google Analytics enables you to close the loop between attributing offline sales, customer lifetime value and marketing campaigns. Also, cost data and custom data can be uploaded to Google Analytics.
Before this change, AdWords and other demand-generating campaigns could only be tracked in terms of leads. After this change, we can associate actual revenue and leverage capabilities of enhanced e-commerce reporting to understand what line items made up each sale. And you can now send additional CRM data points into Google Analytics to better track what they learned about the client through the sales process.
Note, too, that the new version of Analyze.ly fully supports: Bing, Facebook and custom dataset cost data uploads.
InfoTrust believes the change will be of particular interest to you if you have offline or POS needs; if you have recurring transactions, such as subscriptions; or if you have Google AdWords reps who sell to these organizations.
Basic implementation goes like this:
- We deploy the Analyze.ly tag on your site to capture visitor data
- You provide the Analyze.ly team with read-only access to data warehouse/CRM to query data
- The true ROI of your campaigns is more visible to senior management and you look like a hero!
“Technology is Doing the Heavy Lifting”
As Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president of ads and e-commerce said at the Marketing Next 2017 event in San Francisco recently: “Technology is doing the heavy lifting.”
He’s right, of course. And there’s so much more on the horizon.
For example, Google Attribution is a new tool which “Helps to measure the impact of each of your marketing touchpoints across multiple channels and across multiple devices makes it super-easy to take action,” Bill Kee, group product manager for Attribution at Google, said at Marketing Next.
“Taking advantage of data you already have in tools like Ad Words, Google Analytics and Double-Click Search, Google Attribution for the first time makes it easy to get a single view of the path to purchase. To make your life simpler, Google Attribution will unify the existing Attribution features in these tools. And best of all, Google Attribution will be available to all advertisers at no cost,” Kee said.
Data-driven attribution allows you to value all the ads you use and is the best choice for most marketers, he said. It “uses your accounts’ conversion data to calculate how much credit each touchpoint deserves.”
As we’ve seen with clients like Pelican Water Solutions, better information leads to better decisions. InfoTrust is committed to innovations that will improve marketing success. To quote Google’s Ramaswamy: “Technology is the enabler it was meant to be, not another challenge.”
If you’re looking for new ways to leverage your data, contact your InfoTrust Consultant today. InfoTrust is a Google Certified Partner across the Google Suite of products and a Google Analytics Premium Reseller.
