Important B2B Consumer Metrics to Measure With Analytics B2B eCommerce Consumer Insights Thus far, we've gone over a lot of integrations and tools to give your eCommerce CRM superpowers. Microsoft Dynamics CRM eCommerce integration How to integrate big data with eCommerce ERP and CRM Using advanced site analytics CRM integration to understand consumer behavior Why you should integrate Netsuite software and eCommerce Now we can go over some important metrics to keep track of using your integrated eCommerce CRM solution and your analytics platform. The reason we'll be using both is that each has information that can supplement, corroborate, correlate, and fill in the gaps in each respective platform. Typically, the main difference is that analytics platforms show data in aggregate, whereas CRM platforms are useful for showing data for individual customers. Additionally, it's very difficult to track all goal conversions in analytics programs. What if someone calls instead of filling out a contact form? This is but one example where CRM data can supplement the inadequacies of its partner. Let's use this example for diving into metrics, starting with conversion goals. How Do You Measure Success? #1: Goals & Tracking Conversions Setting up your online goals in your analytics platform is essential for tracking conversions, or, of the total number of website visitors, how many users perform an action you've defined as a goal. This could be a checkout button, a URL that users are directed to after filling out a form, signing up for an account etc. Your eCommerce website's goals should be directly aligned with your business goals. Avinash Kaushik's blog, Occam's Razor, is a great resource for learning how to set up custom goals, conversions and custom monitoring of site analytics in the Google Analytics platform. Of course, you may find that all conversion metrics are not measurable online. The most common example are site visitors who choose to call your company rather than purchase a product or fill out a form. This is especially true in SAAS eCommerce websites. Integrating your customer relationship management software with your E-Commerce analytics platform can help solve this problem. If your user profile notes that the prospect called in, it is possible to assign this profile to a heretofore anonymous user to see how they came to call your business. What Seems to be Working? #2: Identifying High-Value Traffic Sources From a marketing perspective, this is extremely important. Why? It helps to concentrate resources in high-value initiatives and pull resources away from campaigns that are not converting for your business to business E Commerce website. This is relatively simple to do in any analytics platform, but let's take it a step further with your E-Commerce CRM integration. Sales teams obsess about qualified leads rather than simply a high volume of leads. Some traffic sources may give you a ton of leads, but none that eventually pan out for your business. Your customer relationship management system information can give you insight into your most valuable, qualified leads and their sources so you can further segment your marketing efforts for maximum efficiency. For example, you can get 1,000 leads from one traffic source, but only a 2% conversion rate from that source. Conversely, you can get 300 leads from another traffic source at a 25% conversion rate. You can even take this another step further and segment traffic sources based on the average amount of revenue from each conversion. Can You Win With Those Words? #3: Identify Your High-Value Keywords A lot of sites get a large proportion of their eCommerce in B2B website visits from search engine traffic. Finding out which keywords people are typing into land on your site is supremely important. This allows you to optimize portions of your site for these keywords to maximize your traffic from search engines (let's just be real and say Google search). Like identifying high-value traffic sources, if your analytics and CRM platforms are integrated, you can identify high-value keywords and adjust your resources accordingly to focus on the keywords that bring in the most conversions. Recently, in Google Analytics, a large segment of search terms are hidden under the '(not provided)' tag due to changes in Google's privacy policies. You can circumvent this by looking at keywords in Google's Webmaster Tools, which isn't the most efficient workaround. However, your options are very limited here. Finally, when selecting your keywords, have you consulted the Keyword Planner to validate the competitiveness of those words? If one of your keywords is, "financial advisor," would you spend thousands optimizing your SEO content for that? I hope not. Schwab and the big boys already own those and you'll never match their spend to own that keyword. Check the long-tail variants like, "financial planning for college" or other services you do until you find a mix of Low competition keywords that you can win (i.e. show up in Google's first 3 organic results). Messaging is Easier if you know your Audience #4: Identify Geographic Hot Spots Identifying which regions your most qualified leads are visiting from can help you refine your location-based marketing strategy both on and offline. You get a lot more ROI out of your ad spending if you choose to target specific regions rather than a large area, like certain states as opposed to the entire US, for example. Additionally, you can even target cities with high concentrations of your target market rather than an entire state. SEO gets them there, CRO closes the deal #5: Optimize Champions & Supporters This is the natural next step after identifying high-value keywords and traffic sources. Typically, keywords and many sources of traffic will link to a particular page within your site, like a blog or an article similar to this one, rather than the homepage. Main pages from the top navigation that cover your main products or services are your champion pages. They should have the most content, and the most attention to CRO (styling the page to improve conversions). Every other page should anchor text link to the Champion, thus making those supporting pages (i.e., ones that help drive traffic and redirect to the Champion to convert the visitor). These can be optimized for the keywords that lead to them, increasing your search engine ranking to bring you even more qualified traffic. How Bounce Rate Affects Rankings #6: Keeping Track of Bounce Rates Bounce rates are the percentage of visitors who visited a page and then left without clicking through to any other areas of your site. Obviously, you want this percentage to be low as you want people to stay on your site. Additionally, pages with high bounce rates are dinged by Google search rankings. The ideal bounce rate differs for each site and for different types of traffic. Direct traffic or traffic from a source that gives the visitor a general idea of what your business to business eCommerce site is about should have a much lower bounce rate than traffic from search engines. generally, direct traffic visitors know exactly what they want or are looking for whereas search traffic visitors can be simply curious or looking for information rather than intent on taking an action. A good rule of thumb is between 10% and 30% for the former and between 50% and 75% for the latter. How Bounce Rate Affects Rankings #7: Knowing How Much Time Visitors are Spending on the Page This metric is pretty straightforward but is worth noting. Obviously, the more time people spend on a particular page, the more interested they are in that page's content. The optimal average amount of time spent on a page in your business to business eCommerce website depends on the amount of content on the page. generally, any page that has an average of 25 seconds or less time spent on the page needs to be revised, improved or redirected and done away with. Which is the right choice? How much organic traffic does the page generate? If a lot, then fix it. How Bounce Rate Affects Rankings #8: Monitor and Optimize Behavior Flow Monitoring behavior flow is seeing how people move throughout your b2b e-commerce website. Ideally, you want a visitor or lead to move from point A (whichever page they land on during their first visit) to point B (the area of your site that contains actionable goals) in as few steps as possible. This is a point where business to business CRM software integration with analytics comes in very handy. Take your high-value leads that have converted into sales and segment them based on how they first visited your site. From there, you can see which pages they visited and spent the most time on before converting. The idea is to optimize that segment's landing page with large buttons and obvious links to the pages those leads are typically most interested in to keep them flowing smoothly toward your goal page. Conversely, remove links to pages where visitors did not spend a lot of time on the page or pages from which prospects left the site entirely. We threw in a bonus item! #9: A/B Test Your Way to More Revenue Using these metrics and insights gained from analytics integration with your business to business CRM platform, you will be able to hypothesize and test the results of any changes you make. The importance of constantly testing and optimizing your site for improving relevant metrics cannot be understated. You'd be surprised by how seemingly tiny and insignificant changes can result in massive positive change. Expedia gained $12 million in profit by removing one field from an online form. A famous example is IGN, the entertainment website giant, and the results of 6 little changes they made made that highlight the small change, big result phenomenon. NOTE: Make sure you have enough data to verify your observations are statistically significant! More than 350+ Combined years experience Clarity's B2B CRM integration Solution Clarity has extensive experience in SEO and internet marketing, which gives us unique and highly relevant insight when building enterprise commerce website integrations with B to B customer relationship management platforms. Our highly skilled marketing and development teams can guide you through the integration process and deliver an extremely efficient automated CRM integration solution. With over 350+ years combined experience as a B2B eCommerce development agency, over 650 satisfied customers and over 1,300 projects under our belt, Clarity can end your search for the perfect CRM integration solution today. Call now for a free consultation to see how we can help you get it done!