In today's business world, data and analytics are more important than ever before. By leveraging data and analytics, businesses can gain a competitive edge and make better-informed decisions about their marketing strategies. B2B sales have never been harder to come by, and today we'll explore why its time to up-skill your tech stack in order to ensure you're capturing the data which will move the needle for your business.

When it comes to creating winning marketing strategies, there are a few key things to keep in mind. First, you need to have a clear understanding of your target audience. Second, you need to know what type of content will resonate with your target audience. And third, you need to be able to track and measure your results so that you can continuously optimise your campaigns.

Here are a few tips for using data and analytics to create winning B2B marketing strategies:

1. Know Your Target Audience
One of the most important things you can do when creating a marketing strategy is to have a clear understanding of your target audience (TAL). Who are they? What are their pain points? What type of content do they consume? What knowledge gaps do they have which your business is well placed and qualified to help fill? By answering these questions, you'll be able to create targeted campaigns that resonates with your audience. This process should be highly focussed on driving consumable content which having being read, will leave your reader with some targeted action items that they can follow in order to move forward in their exploration of this topic.

Want a FREE TAL for your business? TAL's are notoriously hard to build out because there's rarely a convenient resource that is able to output companies which match your organisations individual solutions. At FunnelFuel, we build TAL's for clients by asking questions around your 'best customers' - those that really meet your solutions head on and are best poised to take advantage - and we then model them, and run them against our audience builder which outputs a full list of ALL companies that match. Reach out to us today and book your call, and we'll provide a free TAL for your business. 

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2. Create Compelling Content
Once you know who your target audience is, it's time to start creating compelling content that will resonate with them. When creating content, it's important to keep in mind the different stages of the buyer's journey. For example, if your target audience is in the awareness stage, you'll want to create content that educates them about your product or service. If they're in the consideration stage, you'll want to create content that helps them compare different options. And if they're in the decision stage, you'll want to create content that helps them make a purchase. By creating targeted content for each stage of the buyer's journey, you'll be able to guide your prospects through the sales process and increase conversions.

You also need to consider the different mediums that you'll be using in your full marketing strategy. There's so many places that content of differing forms, lengths and functions can and will live. You'll likely be needing content that resonates with the sub-set of your audience in advertising environments (social, paid search and programmatic ads), longer form website content, shorter form email copy, potentially guest and sponsored posts, organic social posts and much more. Content can and should be in all key forms, including written, video and audio.

3. Track and Measure Your Results
Finally, it's important to track and measure your results so that you can continuously optimise your advert campaigns, organic campaigns and online brand performance. There are a number of different metrics you can track, but some of the most important ones include website traffic, conversion rate, cost per lead, and return on investment (ROI). By tracking these metrics, you'll be able to see what's working and what's not so that you can make necessary adjustments to improve your results over time.

Did you know that tracking is getting harder because internet cookies are getting deprecated? That is why we built our FunnelFuel cookieless analytics solution.

Besides tracking the obvious stuff mentioned above, we introeuced unique capabilities to track the things that B2B marketers care about like;

• Goals and funnels - add as many goals as you want and link them to a funnel, and automatically see your prospects move through the varying stages from awareness to conversion
• Lead forms - conversion rates, drop off points, time to complete
• Companies - see which companies have been on your site and what they have been doing, how long they have been there for, and watch screen recordings of their interactions
• Full attribution modelling to see how all of the different parts of your marketing funnel from SEO to paid search work together to drive prospects through your funnels.

Conclusion
Data and analytics are essential for creating winning marketing strategies. By understanding your target audience and creating targeted content, you can increase website traffic, conversion rates, and ROI. And by tracking and measuring your results, you can continuously optimise your campaigns for even better results. By using unique tools like the FunnelFuel analytics you can gain insights which your competitors don't have and by addressing your entire TAL you can market to a bigger and more robust pool of potential customers then you realised were available.

Ready to discuss how the FunnelFuel technology stack can help you drive your business forward? book your free discovery call today

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In many ways, online lead forms make and break an organisations marketing efforts. They're the sharp end, the stage at which the end user - potentially a prospect who has been in your sales pipe for months or even years - is about to give you their precious contact details. Get this critical web element wrong, and your marketing efforts will yield poorer results, and thus ROI. Get them right and you can outcompete your competition on performance marketings sharpest metric. So how do we get them right?

We recognised the critical importance of lead forms conversion rates when we built the FunnelFuel B2B web analytics platform. This is a collection of critical data points which are often hard to truly capture. Capturing rich data like how long a user hovers over a form before they start filling it, how long it takes to fill, where the drop-off's happen, what percentage of user start the processing of filling the form, how many re-submit the form and how the form performs with different surrounding content (A/B testing) are all data points that we have advised before, are very difficult to extra from Google Analytics

So when we identified the seven easiest ways to improve your online forms conversion rates we have our logical starting point;

1. Start by ensuring you collect the data that you need in order to make informed decisions

There's any number of reasons why your form isn't converting as highly as you'd like, and without collecting the sort of data that we outlined above, then we're shooting blind. Lets look at some of the data that we require and what it can tell us;

What percentage of users start filling the form gives us an insight into how strong our calls to action are, how enticing our offer is and how the visual presentation of the form impacts a users perception on the process of filling it in. It is critical that this is measured only against users who have scrolled deep enough to see the form - which is a key differentiation with our analytics. This metric ideally wouldn't look at page views divided by form starts, and instead needs to look at form element (the web page element that contains the form) views divided by form starts. If we don't make this distinction, we don't know if its other problems with the web page that are causing the drop off - like slow loading, poor mobile compatibility and many other such reasons.

The metric that captures the 'form starters' also partners closely with our 'hesitation metric' which looks at how long people who have seen the form - ie have scrolled deep enough to see it - have then taken to commence filling it in. A high hesitation time is an interesting insight in itself, and can indicate that a form is overly complex but the offer is strong, thus indicating a degree of reluctance to begin filling it in but ultimately it is deemed worth it. Trying to pinpoint the root cause of that reluctance (form length is a good starting point) can radically help improve the forms performance.

The forms conversion rate gives us a snapshot view of the number of people who start the form who then go all the way to completing it. This is a headline metric and it's clear that we want this to be as high as possible. If the web forms conversion rate is very low, then it is a clear demonstration that something is amiss with the form itself, whether that is device issues (does it load poorly on mobile, does it not submit on Safari etc).

The forms time to completion gives us some good insights too. This is simply taking the number of people who start and finish the form (the converters) and measuring how long it took them to finish the form. A low conversion rate married with a high time to completion is a sign that the form is too complex, has ambiguity, drives confusion or perhaps takes a number of clicks to make it submit. In this instance, using the FunnelFuel session recordings can be an incredible way to find people who have struggled, and to debunk the issue. This also works with our time to conversion metric which includes the time spent on the page, reading surrounding content and separately the time spent on the website prior to converting. This drives good insight into what surrounding content works best, partnering brilliantly with our final point;

2. How the form performs on different pages, AKA, A/B testing

Sometimes the problem isn't actually the form, its the collection of content that surrounds it, including the user journey that got the user to the specific page on your site where the form sits. This journey and the content consumed on it is the 'sell' before the form, and acts to build the intent for your product or service. Whilst this point is obvious and clear, it can easily get lost when someone is focussing on optimising their forms conversion rate. The forms performance can be the sum total of the performance of the web assets that proceed it.

Therefore how do we go about identifying which page elements and journeys work best? Well testing different call to action (CTA) texts, content sentiments, and even visual presentation like button colours all makes a difference. We'd encourage you to ensure the tests you run on your forms are robust, meaning you test the forms performance using a tool like the FunnelFuel A/B tester, in order to scientifically measure how a randomised sample of your traffic performs on each page that contains the form. That last bit was important - randomised and fair samples, its otherwise not fair to be judging a forms performance between different subsections of web traffic. Example, if you have a page dedicated to capturing conversions from retargeting web traffic, then this page is benefiting from heightened conversion intent traffic. If we compare that to a form, which could look identical, on a low intent / cold traffic page, then of course the performance will look different. So robust testing of funnels and forms needs to include building dedicated A/B tests for any page where the form is being addressed by a subset of the marketing funnel. We're A/B testing different audiences and funnel stages to forms as well as surrounding content. It may well be that warm traffic coming in on remarketing campaigns is primed and ready to fill in more complex forms, compared to colder traffic which may need to start with smaller and more compact forms, and the marketer can work to enrich that data as the funnel stages progress.

Tests can therefore be expansive, taking funnel stage, user journey and surrounding page elements into consideration. Tests can also be expansive in what we test; moving through a sequential journey of improvement. When we're starting an optimisation journey, we can think more radically by testing totally different content/media mixes and messaging. Simple pages, longer form pages, pages with audio or video, pages with simple text etc can all be sense checked. Once we identify a promising page structure for each funnel stage, we can move on to sequential tweaking of more subtle elements, whether thats button colours, call to action messages, form stage messaging, inline validation and other such sequential improvement tactics.

[learn_more caption="Can I get this data in GA?"] Some of this data lives in Google Analytics, although it is important to note that GA was not built for the B2B marketers purpose. Therefore the nuances in how to measure things like form fill start rates, conversion rates etc is not available in GA, although you can still work with that data to make some assumptions. We added tools like session recordings, try web form analytics, funnels, company and named account tracking (which companies have been on your site and what did they do) and tonnes more content specifically aimed at B2B. Email us at sales@funnelfuel.io to learn more and set-up a time for a free demo[/learn_more]

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Now we have collected the right data, we can continue checking for some of the most common mistakes that we have identified in web forms across hundreds of B2B case studies;

1. Not optimised for all devices: over half of all B2B web traffic is now mobile, so its important to not assume that all form fills will be done on desktop devices. a 5 inch screen renders your content very differently to a 21 inch monitor. Easy ways to fix this form problem: leverage responsive web design and native phone attributes. Things like offering to scan business cards or other details can save a user time, and leans in on a tool which mobile is especially good for. Remembering typing is slower and less precise on touchscreens too.
2. Big lists of options; our heat-map and session recording data, further validated by eye tracking studies have constantly shown large drop down lists to be a major pain point. They cause the user to start shooting up and down the page. Often we see forms where the company has tried to help by putting for example, the United States at the top of a country list, however this makes it impossible to start typing the country to quickly locate other countries beginning with 'U'. Easy ways to fix this form problem: Ensure you have a search box at the top of any dropdown list
3. Asking complicated, difficult or intrusive questions early This is a mistake we see often in an attempt to make forms really short. The logic makes sense however making a form too short, and therefore really complicated or difficult early means you miss out on the psychological consistency principal - which boils down to 'ask easy questions to warm the lead up and it's more likely they'll answer the later more detailed questions
4. No in-line validation Inline validation is where we give the user a prompt after they finish submitting information - such as a green tick when the information has been validated. This simple trick has been shown to lift form completions by 22% 
5. Vague validation errors There are plenty of reasons why a form may trigger validation errors, especially if you're verifying things like addresses or emails. However errors like the one below leave the user with no information to work with in order to fix the issue - the likely outcome? an abandoned lead. What can we do better to fix this problem?
   1. Be really specific with the problem 'we noticed there's no @ in your email address'
   2. Be helpful and tell the user exactly what has gone wrong and how to fix it. This needs to be done in a really friendly customer services rep manner, and not using blunt technical jargon.
   3. Avoid abrasive language like 'incorrect' and use softer tones like 'your username and email don't match instead of 'you entered your email incorrectly'.

 

 

Google Analytics (GA) is the go-to web analytics platform in the marketing world, with its extensive use spanning the B2C and B2B worlds. Today we explore where GA has limitations for B2B marketers and where there can be alternative solutions that can provide a better fit the unique challenges that B2B presents.

In our opinion there are a number of core challenges which GA leaves B2B marketers struggling to overcome;

• GA continues to have legality concerns, and B2B publishers and marketers typically have access to sensitive data beyond the individual, meaning a B2B site may have personally sensitive data as well as business sensitive data - which compounds the PII concerns. We have spoken about the potential legal ramifications for GA and B2B publishing here 
• GA is at its core an individual [person] tracking solution, which really boils down even further to being a devices tracking platform - where B2B needs the ability to track accounts. In the World of B2B, what we really need is the ability to track accounts and the decision making universe that lives within that named account. Where multiple users from the same organisation might access a website, it becomes challenging to identify and track individual users accurately. This limitation makes it difficult to get a comprehensive understanding of user journeys and behaviour within an organisation
• GA doesn't measure every page view - it measures samples of page views - which is designed for modelling data in very large scale environments like B2C news websites. In B2B we need precision monitoring, and not scaled modelling.
• GA has no capability to handle named account tracking and multiple stakeholders - and we have talked on this blog before about how the average B2B organisation has 5.4 individual stakeholders in their decision making cycle - and with that, no way to track long sales cycles. This is because GA relies on web cookies, which firstly are being phased out and secondly, they have an average lifespan of just 30 days.
• GA lacks the demographic data that really matters or B2B publishers and advertisers - where it carries some basic demographic data like gender and age, it lacks data around job roles, seniority and firmographic data like company size, industry and specialism.
• GA is siloed, without integrating into other key B2B platforms like SalesForce, Marketo, and Hubspot, meaning that metrics like revenue and attribution are limited to the onsite behaviour
• You are essentially swapping your extremely valuable first party data with Google in return for Analytics. This may or may not be a problem, but if you believe you have high value audience segments, then you may want to build more robust moats around your data pools
• GA lacks monitoring tools which are really relevant to B2B marketers, with data lacking or non-existent in areas like
  • Which accounts have been on site, what have they read, how long were they there, did they show intent?
  • How our key web forms perform
  • Onsite conversion reporting (without Google bias) and integration with audience API's of media buying platforms where B2B marketers invest significantly - such as LinkedIn
  • Roll-up reporting to see all stats across micro-sites in one view
  • Richer media analytics; videos, audio etc

So far we have only presented problems, and at this stage, its important that I point out that I cannot provide ALL of the solutions. However here at FunnelFuel, we have been busy building an insights and analytics solution which we hope over time will continue to grow to satisfy more and more of these concerns. Here's an overview of how it all works and what it does

Introducing The FunnelFuel B2B Analytics Platform

Taking these limitations into account, we set about designing a B2B analytics platform which was built from the ground up to meet the needs in this space. Here are some of our core features;

A GDPR compliant, Cookieless alternative to GA

It's no secret that web cookies are an endangered species harking back to the early days of the web. If you missed the memo, they are on their way out, and platforms like Google are in the process of deprecating them. In a more privacy aware world spearheaded by initiatives like GDPR, cookies are much less tolerated by users, many of whom are blocking them. Step forward the FunnelFuel analytics

What are the benefits of going 'cookieless'?

1. Cookieless solutions are more accurate and frankly those solutions still using cookies are increasingly becoming more and more unreliable. These solutions do not need cookie banners and thus you don't need to second guess decisions in order to get the full picture.
2. Privacy friendly - as personal data is not collected, you get assurance that you're respecting users whilst meeting all the privacy law compliance requirements, globally.
3. No absolute need for annoying web cookie consent banners - which eliminates hassle for your users. We still recommend that sites using FunnelFuel follow the disclosure guidance that we offer, as we believe a front foot, transparent and respectful relationships with your web users necessitates this - but we also use a core tracker which has ben signed of within the EU as not requiring disclosure.
4. GDPR compliance - as cookieless analytics solutions use alternative tracking methods to protect a users privacy, they're easily configured to comply with strict privacy laws like GDPR.
5. Data is stored on our server not your users device - giving you true first party data ownership

Cookieless solutions like FunnelFuel use alternative [to cookies] tracking like IP addresses, which can't get deleted by users or turned off. IP addresses have an average lifespan of over 1 year versus 30 days for cookies, so they represent better alignment with B2B sales cycles too. Company level IP addresses remain static on average for much longer, so organisation level tracking is even more robust again.

Named accounts and company level tracking comes front and centre

We use robust and best in class databases to identify companies visiting your website/s based on their IP address (we link IP ranges back to organisations, we don't store IP addresses, we instead link them to organisations and then save the organisation, and only then when the company is >50 employees in the office we're tracking), giving us a much clearer view as to which named accounts have been on your web site in with country, globally.

We then apply the company data against all of your usual web analytics data points; like city, time on page, pages visited, funnels, forms, entry pages, referrer, exit pages and many more

We also uniquely crawl your site to categorise your pages into FunnelFuel's B2B content taxonomy. This helps you to quickly understand exactly what topics have been read about by which company. Additionally, we crawl B2B publisher pages using the same technology, making it easy for B2B advertisers to buy super-relevant pages around the internet on the worlds leading niche B2B websites.

5 cookieless attribution models

We could talk all day about attribution modelling, and how it is evolving. I believe the below captures a pretty thorough overview of how it can work. Here at FunnelFuel we deploy a number of these potential tactics, and continue to enhance our offering - but the long and the short of it becomes - a cookieless approach is best suited to monitoring longer sales cycles more accurately and the 5 different models help build a really deep picture of the marketing landscape and how it interacts between channels.

Cookieless attribution modelling refers to the practice of attributing conversions or actions to marketing channels or touchpoints without relying on traditional tracking cookies. This approach has gained importance due to privacy concerns and increasing restrictions on third-party cookies. Instead of cookies, cookieless attribution modelling utilises alternative methods and technologies to track and attribute conversions accurately. Here's how it works:

1. User-level identifiers: Cookieless attribution relies on user-level identifiers, such as hashed email addresses or device IDs, to track and connect user interactions across different touchpoints. These identifiers serve as a privacy-friendly alternative to cookies and enable the attribution model to link user actions without relying on individual tracking cookies.
2. Deterministic matching: Deterministic matching is one of the key techniques used in cookieless attribution modelling. It involves matching the user-level identifiers across different marketing channels or platforms to create a unified view of the customer journey. This matching can be done through common identifiers shared by the user, such as an email address provided during a website registration or login process.
3. Probabilistic matching: In cases where deterministic matching is not possible or practical, probabilistic matching is employed. This method uses statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to analyse patterns and behaviours to make probabilistic associations between user actions and touchpoints. It relies on various data points, such as IP addresses, browser characteristics, device information, and contextual data, to identify and connect user interactions.
4. Cross-device tracking: With the prevalence of multiple devices used by individuals, cross-device tracking becomes crucial for accurate attribution. Cookieless attribution modelling incorporates techniques to track and link user interactions across different devices, allowing marketers to understand the impact of various touchpoints within the customer journey.
5. First-party data integration: Cookieless attribution modelling emphasises the use of first-party data, which is data collected directly from users with their consent. By integrating first-party data from different sources, such as websites, apps, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketers can gain a more comprehensive view of the customer journey and attribute conversions accurately.
6. Machine learning and algorithms: Advanced machine learning algorithms are employed in cookieless attribution modelling to analyse user behaviour, identify patterns, and determine the most significant touchpoints in the conversion process. These algorithms consider various factors, including the timing, sequence, and impact of touchpoints, to assign appropriate credit to each channel or interaction.
7. Contextual and campaign-level data: Cookieless attribution modelling takes into account contextual information, such as the content of the ad or the landing page, to better understand the influence of specific campaigns or creative elements. By analysing campaign-level data, marketers can identify the effectiveness of different marketing initiatives and optimise their strategies accordingly.

Cookieless attribution modelling represents an evolving landscape as marketers adapt to changing privacy regulations and technological advancements. It requires leveraging alternative user identifiers, advanced matching techniques, cross-device tracking, and robust data analysis to attribute conversions accurately and gain insights into the impact of marketing efforts across different touchpoints.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Conversion rate optimisation first really came to the fore in the Worlds of B2C, more specifically in the fast paced, entirely ad funded world of D2C brands. Direct to Consumer brands popped up around the growth in the power of the ad engines behinds sites like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, where the proliferation of somewhat cheap clicks married with robust demographic data created a D2C boom. D2C brands use high volumes of consumer data to optimise, but B2B presents a different set of challenges.

We don't get the benefit of high volumes of data pools, but we do benefit from precision around data. The average B2B website isn't counting its daily visits in the millions, we're instead wanting to carve up smaller pools of data even more granularly. This opens up some tools which are incredibly useful for B2B which are harder to use in B2C, like;

1. Session recordings; we enable B2B marketers and publishers to identify named accounts that enter their website and to watch recordings of their exact activity on site. Sometimes sheer numbers (time on site, page views etc) don't tell the full story, and watching exactly what a named account did opens a new world of precision data
2. Dynamic A/B testing is baked in - meaning you can test subtle changes in landing pages in order to drive stronger responses, then automatically direct your traffic to the winning page. This one comes straight out of the D2C playbook and is now available for B2B marketers who want to get the maximum impact when named accounts come onto their website/s
3. Form analytics - B2B sites are full with forms, and these come in thousands of variations. Slight tweaks can have huge conversion impacts. We measure all forms, and provide insights that can radically improve form fill rates. Small tweaks to the language [to make forms less complicated], reduction in fields, or optimising better to mobile are just 3 ways that your form can be letting you down. We show data like
   1. What percentage of users start the form
   2. The forms conversion rate
   3. How many people re-submit the form
   4. What the hesitation time is (how long to people hover over before starting the form)
   5. How long it takes to fill in the form on average
   6. Time to conversion
   7. Hoe the same form performs on different pages (linked to our A/B testing tools)
4. Funnels; these help measure the journey from first interaction to completion. This helps identify how your website/s flow, where drop-offs happen, which actions are taken and how each funnel compares. Build comprehensive sets of funnels which match user journeys, including refer insights on entry and exit points, including a segmented user log of all visitors who entered funnels. Small tweaks in each stages performance can make huge overall impacts

Visitor and company profiles

One of our most standout features is our user and company profiles, which enable you to identify exactly what each individual visitor has done on your web properties. We create a persistent user profile which is updated like a doctors record every time that user returns to the website. The same applies for companies and named accounts, meaning you have an organisation level profile card and a profile card for all employees of that organisation who visited your sites.

Unbiassed search engine metrics to aid SEO

In a world as competitive as B2B, where winning attention from ITDM's is ever harder and more fraught, your brand needs to be omnipresent in all areas online where ITDM's are spending time, from owning contextual placements next to research media to owning high ranking positions across the key search engines - including Google, Yahoo and Bing. We have built full integrations with each of these search engines search consoles, to seamlessly pull a much fuller suite of SEO based ranking data into our analytics platform

What does this mean in reality? well anybody who has looked at these sorts of reports in Google will be familiar with the phrase 'keyword not defined' in referrer reports. We have entirely removed this problem

We then provide unbiassed search engine ranking reports, keyword ranking positions, crawling statistics, campaign tracking and full web vitals.

Whether you need specialist B2B SEO help and work with FunnelFuel, or otherwise handle your SEO directly or with an agency, this data is invaluable in delivering transparency and the data required to make real improvements in your brands online visibility

Tag manager

B2B marketers are typically running advertising campaigns across a wide range of media buying platforms, whether that's Google, LinkedIn, FunnelFuel, Twitter etc. These platforms all want to place tracking pixels on site, which often causes a huge compliance issue as well as concerns around data security and integrity. Pixels are a source of weakness and can cause page rendering issues, slower websites etc.

That's why we built a full tag manager which gives you easy control over all third party tracking codes. This centralised management makes it easy for you to deploy tracking without needing a developer or otherwise having to go into the backend of your site. Dropping pixels this way is lighter touch and more controlled then a direct integration.

 

Do you want to learn more about how FunnelFuel can help your business with better B2B analytics and media buying? Reach out using the form below to schedule your free demo and solutions discussion with one of our B2B specialists today