I get asked by many Prospects during the sales process about the difference between web tracking functionality offered by web analytics vendors like Google Analytics and Marketing Automation solutions like Market2Lead. There is a definitely an overlap between the two types of solutions, but at the same time there is a significant difference too. Let me elaborate.
Traditional Web Analytics tools like Google, Omniture or Coremetrics do a great job in tracking and reporting on overall traffic trends on the corporate website.
- You get to understand where traffic is coming from – Direct Traffic, Referring Sites or Search Engines
- You can track popularity of content on your site – page views per page, bounce rates
- Monitor overall metrics - Visits, Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, Avg. time on site
Web Analytics vendors do a great job in helping you understand how your corporate website is contributing towards overall Marketing goals like awareness, brand building and demand generation.
You can get some of these metrics from the current generation Marketing Automation solutions that do offer website tracking as a feature (including Market2Lead). But this should not be the key criteria for you to evaluate MA solutions for this feature.
There are 2 key aspects that are unique to MA solutions.
1. Web tracking by user/company profile: Marketing Automation solutions give you the ability to track usage patterns by profile of your Contacts or the companies they work for. Marketing Automation systems are the record keeper of your house database and have rich profile information like Demographic, Firmographic, Needs Insights etc. Now, imagine the power you have at your disposal if you can combine a person’s information with his web activity information. You can conduct all sorts of interesting analysis like:
- What % of my traffic is executives/VPs/Directors/Managers/IT
- What % of my offers are being picked up by people with different roles and managing different functions within their companies
- What % of my content is appealing to SMB companies/Midsize companies/large enterprises
- Is my contact’s online behavior validating the interest he/she expressed in filling out a form
2. Notifications to sales reps: You can now alert your sales staff based on key web activities that are recorded within your MA solution. Sales reps are always looking for the right reason to pick up the phone and call their Leads or Opportunities. Some of the scenarios where MA solutions can help are:
- A key opportunity that went dark during the negotiation phase is reviewing case studies on the website. Such information gives reps the assurance that the Opportunity is still active and is evaluating risk by looking for relevant case studies
- A Lead that stopped responding to phone calls was spotted on the website. This is a great opportunity for the rep to call the Lead and hope to connect with him/her while he/she is still at his/her desk
- Give reps a better qualified Lead that has not just filled a form but has demonstrated interest by invested an appropriate amount of time reading relevant content
- Assist Leads who are trying to understand your value proposition by sending them follow up offers based on what they are reading on your website
In my opinion, web tracking functionality from Marketing Automation solution is complimentary to web tracking from the standard Web analytics tools.
-Sundeep
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