There were lots of good concepts presented, but I wanted to highlight a couple that we think are particularly relevant. These are the kinds of things that can lead to significantly improved results in the B2B online space and that offer opportunities to gain competitive advantage over those that are not making the most of their rich analytics data.

1. Don’t just collect numbers - measure OUTCOMES

The clickstream may be the starting point for analytics, but the real gold is insight at the end of a process that encompasses analysis of multiple outcomes, experimentation/testing to optimize these outcomes, listening to voice of customer (mentioned only briefly, but Avinash has strongly advocated it elsewhere), and gathering competitive intelligence that can be put to work in support of your outcomes. The point is that your website has a purpose and the outcomes that you want visitors to accomplish should be identified, measured, analyzed, improved upon. Yes, this means looking at the clickstream, but looking at it with a purpose and digging in to find actionable information. Examples included:

• using bounce rates to identify valuable traffic sources, keywords, and content;
• going beyond site-wide averages to analyze behavior by visitor segment in order to identify the valuable visitor groups, then using this information to attract more valuable visitors;
• using keyword tools such as the Google Search-based Keyword Tool to identify long-tail keywords that can be leveraged to drive visitors to pages with your most valuable outcomes (such as priority product categories);
• focusing on critical outcomes by analyzing your conversion funnel to find and remove sticking points – small changes that can have big impact;
• using outcomes for social media: RSS subscribers, Twitter retweets (as opposed to followers), or other relevant measures that tell you how many people are actually engaging.

2. Keep an eye on MICRO conversions as well as macro conversions

As an extension of the central theme of measuring outcomes, Avinash had some great things to say about going beyond macro conversion analysis, since it is just a tiny percentage of overall activity on your site and lots of other potentially valuable things are going on.  Sure it is critical to watch the macro conversions - sales or the sales lead - but there are usually various other ‘micro’ conversions that may be stepping stones to the sale or lead, such as a catalog request or email sign-up. We all count them, but there is real benefit to setting goals in analytics and establishing a value for each goal that can be tracked back to marketing efforts.  So people who visited your site via PPC requested ‘x’ number of catalogs this month. If you talk to your catalog people and find out average revenue per catalog, you can attach that value to each catalog request and you now have a meaningful estimate of the return on your PPC investment that you didn’t quantify before.

Bonus Material

Some friendly reminders from Avinash that we should all keep in mind when implementing our B2B marketing strategies:

• Marketing is ultimately about people communicating with people; too often B2B marketers forget that and slide into robot to robot communication mode.
• Take advantage of experimentation and testing and learn to be wrong quickly, make adjustments to improve, and keep on testing.
• Reporting is NOT analysis – just collecting the data, even if it is the right data, is not enough unless you think about what the data is telling you, look for patterns and correlations, and use these to identify actions that can improve your outcomes.

This was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Avinash had to say during the webinar, but some excellent starting points on the path toward leveraging analytics for B2B success.


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