You Ask, I Answer: B2B Conversions in Google Analytics 4?

In today's episode, Erica asks, what are some good goals for B2B businesses to set up in Google Analytics for wherever you have customer touch points? So one of the challenges with B2B marketing, particularly complex sales, which are sales that have multiple decision makers, long sales cycles, sometimes sales cycles that go well past the 90-day attribution window of Google Analytics, is that you can't do full funnel analysis with Google Analytics alone. A big part of it's going to be what happens in your marketing automation system, what happens in your CRM and your customer management system. So to get value out of Google Analytics, you have to look at those touch points that are within the window of attribution, that 90-day rolling window, and that have meaning in your sales process. So things that would be uh important to track would be simple stuff like did you request a demo or schedule a sales call?

Those would be very obvious things that are towards the bottom of the marketing funnel and the top of the sales funnel where you have a handoff to uh sales with a marketing qualified lead. And then everything that happens prior to that uh for a marketing qualified lead. So you're talking about all the different touch points, such as uh downloading or uh an ebook or a webinar or a white paper of you know, form fills of any kind. Uh you might be wanting to look at uh large amounts of engagement. Somebody who is on your site and is hitting uh important pages like your about page, your leadership page, your products and services page.

If someone does all of those, uh that might be something that you'd want to know. Uh how much content has a person consumed? Uh clicks on things like uh ungated PDFs, phone numbers, emails, anything on your site that indicates some level of intent or interest in you that goes above and beyond uh just a curious looky-loo. Not that there's anything wrong with curious looky loose, but you'll find that uh, well, at least I've found that in my data, a lot of the curious looky-loos are unqualified, right? They're academic students uh or researchers or things, people looking for uh content that I'm happy to provide, but they're not gonna turn into a viable sales opportunity anytime soon.

Now, that's not to say it never happens. Uh, I have had uh folks who have been uh on my email list uh for 10 years and gone from you know marketing associate to VP of marketing uh in the industry, and you know, suddenly they're they are decision makers, and it took 10 years to get to that point, right? Which is well outside of the attribution window that that Google Analytics has. So it's good to have a look at all these different activities and track them, track them as conversions, track them as uh events in Google Analytics for, and then start doing mathematical analysis, start doing statistical analysis of the people who convert to true sales qualified leads or sales opportunities, which of these metrics do they all have in common? Uh, which of these metrics do they not have?

Do people who are serious sales opportunities, do they have uh a certain number of ebook downloads? This is all stuff that you can do with advanced technology like machine learning and data science models and stuff, but you can also do uh a scaled down version of this again, just looking at at raw activity levels. If you group everybody who's a true sales qualified lead in one bucket, and you look at all their activities in your marketing automation system, and then you look at everybody who's not a sales qualified lead, just tallying up counts. Do non-qualified leads do more things of a certain type than others. And that's then stuff that you would want to in Google Analytics uh maybe say, you know what?

Uh webinar participants, not a good indicator. I'm making this up. Webinar participants, not a good indicator of a qualified lead, right? Uh 75% of our unqualified leads attended webinars and only 25% attended webinars. So you might say in Google Analytics, okay, we're gonna keep tracking that as an event.

We're gonna unmark it as a conversion because it's not helpful anymore. It just doesn't do the job in terms of helping us understand the things we need to do to get more qualified leads to identify more qualified leads. So what I would do to start is I would start by setting up events for pretty much every customer touch point. Wait, however long your sales cycle is times two, right? So if your sales cycle or your, I guess your marketing qualified lead cycle is 40 days, right?

Wait for 80 days, your your marketing qualified lead cycle times two, and then do that basic math. Tally up those events which are conversions uh that the converted uh qualified leads have in common, tally up those events that are not, and then adjust your Google Analytics to count some things as conversions and other things just as events, just as things that are nice to know. And then repeat that analysis on a regular and frequent basis, maybe quarterly. Again, to capture if maybe in Q1 webinars are not the thing, but maybe in Q4 it is. Maybe people's needs have changed at certain times of the year based on what's going on in their own businesses.

So you want to re-evaluate that those events. But that's one of the powerful things about Google Analytics 4. You can set up a ton of events and then do some homework and figure out which of those events should be marked as conversions and which of them you should just leave as events. Uh, and knowing you're still going to have the data if you want to be able to uh analyze it later on down the road. You will just need to mark it as a conversion if you want to use it for the built-in attribution tools.

But uh, that's what I my suggestion would be. So, really good question. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.