In this episode we go deep into using Google Analytics for B2B digital revenue attribution with Steffen Hedebrandt, who is the chief revenue officer and cofounder at Dreamdata.io in Copenhagen, Denmark, talks about digital revenue attribution, purchase intent and user tracking.

Stefan focuses primarily on digital marketing for B2B software as a service providers, all the time must nurture leads through cell cycle to a decision point, which hopefully results in a sale. As a result, he thinks a lot about keyword intent. The specific term someone searches says a great deal about there likelihood to complete a purchase. And this interview, he shares his formula for keyword intent strategy.

Does a lot work helping SaaS companies with 15-500 employees. He targets marketing directors and says direct sales in the fastest channel. Or you can try to capture the highest intent by purchasing traffic from very specific channels like Capterra or G2, where visitors are very far down the purchase funnel, essentially comparing competing services to each other, which is among the strongest indicators of intent to purchase because the buyer has already invested a lot of time and energy into researching a product category.

People are starting to understand the difference between anonymous and authenticated tracking. Anonymous user tracking platforms like Google Analytics track devices, rather than individuals. That means Google Analytics is limited in its ability to understand behavior, since the same customer journey can span a variety of different devices.

To get more customers, you need to understand the entire journey from start to finish and not just the last click. Google Analytics attempts to she light on the journey with its Multi Channel Funnel Assisted Conversions report, but its accuracy is limited by user anonymity. Customer data platforms, on the other hand, use email address to circumvent double counting the same users on different devices. Customer data platforms and CRMs are ways to count authenticated user activity, which is always going to be more accurate.

Generally speaking, for impulse purchases, direct to Consumer purchases, or any other purchase where the cell cycle is relatively short, Google analytics offers all sorts of great insights for increasing conversions. However, if on the other hand you are a B2B assuring prospects through the sales cycle, the information from Google analytics is probably going to be a bit more scattered and less useful.

We also spoke about the previous podcast interviews I recorded with Justin Cutroni, who at the time was independent but who currently works for Google. Most advertising platforms use tracking parameters to minimizes the number of users who are tracked as “direct” visitors. One way to make sure your links don't register as “direct” is by using the Campaign URL Builder tool to assign UTM parameters to your links.

Email marketing metrics are not what they used to be. Cybersecurity software monitors inbound emails, sometimes triggering what looks like an email open, but in fact was not. If you want to be sure that someone actually opened your email, you want to see a minimum of two opens. That way you know it was the person who opened the email, and not software scanning inbound email messages prior to distributing them to the recipient. Better yet, use click thrus and responses as a more accurate measure of engagement. For more on email marketing best practices, check out my 2021 Email Marketing Guide.

If you'd like to get a look a look at the Dreamdata.io customer data platform, reach out to Steffen for help with solve their multi-touch attribution challenges and they work particularly well with companies using best-of-breed stacks. In the tradition of product-led marketing, Dreamdata has a free tier you can play around with to see if it's a fit for you.

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