Google Analytics and Measuring Marketing Performance

I’ll start by saying that we choose each digital tool to run our businesses because they are designed to handle a piece of the business complexity. For instance, I use Quickbooks for accounting because it’s designed by an army of people and took years to build so that I can do my accounting for my business hassle-free, and it works! Similarly, I use Squarespace to build my website, for the same reasons, they made it easy for me to manage it, and it works as well! And to be fair I don’t want Quickbooks to host my website nor SquareSpace to do my accounting, though some of you may say, well, it would be nice to have everything done in one place, and you are not wrong for saying that.

The truth is it would be nice to login to 1 platform and run your business however it would be extremely inefficient and costly to make that happen when we need more than just accounting and web hosting to run our businesses, which may include email marketing, shipping, payroll, CRM, website analytics, etc.

The good thing is that most of the modern platforms already offer a form of integration between systems and surface the most meaningful data across connected platforms. However, if you want more than just a few data points then you will need to look at custom configurations and development.

Well, I am straying away a bit from my main point here, measuring marketing performance. Just like each of the tools I mentioned above, Google Analytics exists to solve a business challenge as well, that is to help us observe, and analyze the customer behavior on our web properties by providing us metrics on traffic acquisition, events, and conversions. Again, the GA tool’s been around for decades now and was built by an army of people with countless hours of development.

Now, the main reason why I am writing all this is, I’ve worked with many teams, consultants, and vendors on best practices for capturing marketing attribution data, and received many requests to make this available in Salesforce by streaming data into it, but, it needs to be said that the data that would flow into Salesforce (CRM) would be a “limited” replication of what exists in Google Analytics already. In other words, what we’ve accomplished is to create an extremely basic version of what Google Analytics offers out of the box without any development effort.

Now, why do business leaders still want to capture the data in their CRM then? A few possible answers lie in the points below.

• This is the best answer I’ve heard so far. Marketing and sales teams can’t take action on a data point that lives in GA through CRM.
  This is true, unfortunately, there is no functionality out-of-the-box functionality in Salesforce that can trigger based on web user activity since all data in GA is anonymous. However, there are workarounds such as capturing the Google User ID and storing it in our CRM or the other way around by storing your CRM ID in GA and then signaling to CRM when a GUID-CRMID pair takes an action on something. However, it’s worth mentioning that I’m yet to hear and see evidence that marketing teams are actually taking action on the captured data which makes the reasoning behind the request a moot point.

• There are no resources in the team who can manage GA data and produce insights.
  It’s true that today the learning curve for GA is steeper, especially after upgrading from Universal Analytics to the latest GA4 version which is a completely different take on web analytics. However, it’s possible and even can be considered easy with some effort from organizations and individuals to fully utilize GA, by adding a dedicated data person in the marketing team or training an existing team member with the many available learning resources from Google and LinkedIn Learning platforms. If these two aren’t viable options for your teams then look for an external vendor that can digest the data and present insights to you on an ongoing basis.

It’s a tempting idea to have all data on one platform. Marketing, sales, revenue, accounting, web activities, customer information, everything. And with enough budget, resources, and time it’s attainable. However, there are very few companies that can achieve this and in most cases, it’s unrealistic and unnecessary to pursue.

While it’s tempting we need to make sane decisions on the data we collect and press on getting answers for the why, when, where, how, and what of the data before we dive into developing these systems.

To me, the $ spent on hiring the right talent to analyze Google Analytics data is better spent compared to the $ spent on developing methods to bring in that data as a whole or in part into Salesforce or any other CRM system, unless you have unlimited resources.

In closing, I’d highly recommend investing in data analysis talent or contracting the work out to a vendor that will provide you with insights that can help you navigate your business.

I’d love to hear from you if you have feedback on this article.