Enterprise Features

Killer B2B Advice For Google Analytics

by Paul Rudo on 07/03/11 at 9:13 pm

B2B companies have some interesting challenges when it comes to monitoring their visitors. They generally spend much more on a per-visitor basis than a B2C company would, and their traffic volumes are often too low to extract any useable data.

And online ad rates are only going up, as consumers stop responding to other traditional media like print, radio and television. I know of one particular enterprise software niche where AdWords charges more than $21 per click for the top keyword position.

Given the enormous traffic acquisition costs, the best way to minimize the cost-per-sale of online marketing for B2B companies would be to on-site optimize lead conversion in order to collect more customer data. Each lead that clicks on your contact page without filling out the form is wasted money and lost potential business.

But what if you could actually find out who was on your web site without having them fill out a form? Believe it or not, this is possible. And best of all, it’s absolutely free and completely ethical!

First of all, you’ll need to open Google Analytics and click on the “Custom Reporting” link on the left hand side, then click “Manage Custom Reports”. Clicking on the “Create New Custom Report” link in this section will bring you to the report builder tool.

From the blue Metrics box, select:

• Visits
• Pages Per Visit
• Pageviews
• New Visits
• Unique Visitors
• Pages/Visit

From the green Dimensions Box, select the following in order:

1. Country/Territory
2. Service Provider

Then, click on the Create Report button to save the changes. This report will give you a list of geographical locations that will be important when assigning leads to their proper territories. This report can also be further adjusted for provinces and territories.

By clicking on a country, you’ll get a listing of service providers for each of these visitors. Although the vast
majority of these are from Internet Service Providers or universities, there are a number of visitors who are accessing you from identifiable corporate networks.

Now comes the hard part. You’ll need to filter out all of the junk while preserving only corporate network listings. In order to do this, simply scroll down to the bottom of the page and enter your filter parameters. This requires a bit of knowledge of Google’s regular expression syntax, which can be found here.

It’s important to note that you aren’t violating anyone’s privacy here. These companies intentionally went out of their way to ensure that their online activities were as transparent as possible. And you’re simply reaping the benefits.

Another point to keep in mind is that – although you know which companies were on your site – you have no idea which person was browsing your site. This will require some research on your part.

Now that you know who’s been visiting your web site, you have a nice list of high-probability cold-call targets. I’ve seen companies increase their online marketing ROI by over 30 percent, just using this free technique.

Although you won’t be able to find smaller companies using this report, it’s excellent for detecting early interest from larger organizations with gatekeepers and complex buying cycles.

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2. Preventing Privacy Leaks Within Your Company – How Confidential Documents End Up On Google
3. HUGE List of Amazing Things You Didn’t Know Google Docs Could Do
4. Zilliant Pricing Optimization Solution And Advice For B2B