Web Analytics & Marketing Automation: Why Businesses Need Both

From various conversations with others in my profession, I am starting to realize that very little is understood about the role of web analytics in the context of this brave new world of b2b marketing automation. In this article is an explanation of how to think about these tools and the types of questions they can answer for your business.

Let’s start with the definitions as it is important to put each of these terms into context:

Marketing automation tool – a marketing database (think Salesforce, but for marketing).  You place marketing leads here first until they are ready to be passed into your business CRM and to a sales representative.

With the help of compelling content delivered via email & your website, you can help educate prospects in this database about your solution as you progressively glean more information about who they are and what solution would benefit them the most.

In order to easily collect the activity information of your prospects at this phase, the automation tool also has a web tracking component that saves a person’s web activity from a particular campaign into a field in the marketing database.

Web analytics – a tool that tracks visitor activity at an aggregate level; also helps build traffic trending over time, etc. on your web properties. You typically get very high level data and no IP information with a service like Google Analytics, but you can drill down to the individual with services such as Webtrends and Omniture.

Filling the Marketing & Sales Funnel
Implementing a marketing automation tool helps ease some of the work hours a marketing department spends manually gathering information and setting up workflows. With that freed time, the team has more resources to dedicate to generating demand for the business.

Demand Generation activities – events, PR, contributed articles, speaking engagements, advertising, SEO, social media – will feed the marketing database with contacts that can be nurtured, qualified, and then passed to Sales based on rules that marketing & sales establish together.

Creating a Lean & Mean Demand Generation Machine
Peter Young from Webtrends (@webtrendspeter, LinkedIn profile) has a very neat metaphor for describing the difference between web analytics and marketing automation:

“Marketing automation is like looking through the windshield of your car. Analytics is like looking into the rear-view mirror – both are critical to a positive driving experience.”

Another useful way to think about the power of web analytics is in the context of the Sales & Marketing Funnel. Web analytics reports and dashboard help marketers optimize web properties in order to bring visitors into the Marketing & Sales Funnel. Path analysis, web behavior tracking, landing page optimization, etc. all fall into this part of the experience. When you make changes to your web properties you can also check against historical data and make decisions based on those baselines.

The key at this step is to fine-tune the web properties to drive conversions (in many cases, this would be obtaining vistors’ email address for future email marketing).

Down the Rabbit Hole: Passing from Top of Funnel into the Marketing & Sales Funnel
As soon as someone identifies themselves, they immediately get placed in the marketing database, where further web activity, qualification (lead scoring), segmentation, and education (lead nurturing) takes place. From this point on, you may want to segment out the web traffic of these warm prospects visiting your site and use content marketing to drive thought leadership and educational messages to them.

Beyond the Horizon: Messaging To Your Customer
The other, sometimes overlooked, aspect is that this marketing database of contacts will keep track of a prospect’s behavior on your web properties into their transition as a customer. Additional segmentation on your customer population can help drive customer retention and programs that target your base. You can use marketing automation to learn, indirectly or directly, more about your customers’ needs.

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About the B2Bblogger: Rodica Buzescu (@rodica) is a marketing manager at Amazon Web Services. She enjoys combining interdisciplinary knowledge and various agency & B2B experience in digital marketing to solve larger marketing challenges. Rodica sometimes blogs on various marketing, management, and bigger strategy ideas at http://morphingthrough.blogspot.com.

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