CRM Integration #3 – Passing CRM Meta-Data to Web Analytics

(Estimated Time to Read this Post = 2.5 Minutes)

In my last few posts I have been delving into Web Analytics & CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integration. In my first post I described how you can pass Web Analytics Data to your CRM system to help your sales people. In my last post, I described how you could pass CRM data like Leads, Opportunities and Revenue into your Web Analytics tool. In this post, I will round out the trilogy by describing how you can use CRM data as Web Analytics meta-data to enhance your Web Analytics reporting.

My Golf Handicap Story
Since most people don’t often like talking about meta-data, I will begin by sharing an easier to understand story which first taught me how interesting integrating CRM and Web Analytics data could be. Back when I managed the website for the CME, we had situation in which we were trying to sell tickets for a major golf tournament. Unfortunately, the event was nearing and we still had lots of tickets to sell. At the time, I recalled that, for registered website users, we had golf handicap as one of our CRM fields in our Salesforce.com system (our customers were traders and spent a lot of time golfing!). I had recently worked on capturing each customer’s website ID in SiteCatalyst and also placing it in our CRM system. Suddenly, the light bulb went on in my head…why not upload golf handicap as a SAINT Classification of the website ID I had in an sProps and eVar in SiteCatalyst? I created a SAINT Classification table that passed in the raw handicap and also grouped it into buckets like this:

Whereas previously I could see what pages each website ID had viewed on the website, I could now expand that to see the same data for this new golf handicap Classification of that variable. The result was a report like this, in which I could see the most popular pages for website visitors by golf handicap:

From there, all that was left to do was to target some ads on those pages and voilà, the tickets were soon gone!

For me, this was more experimental than anything else, but it was the catalyst (no pun intended!) which helped me see the power of integrating CRM and Web Analytics. Of course back then there were no API’s to help pass data between systems, but nowadays, this is much easier (i.e. Genesis integrations). With this in mind, let’s take a look at a few more examples of how you can take advantage of this concept.

Examples of Passing CRM Meta-Data to Web Analytics
Now that you get the general idea, I’ll walk you through some other examples of enriching your Web Analytics data by bringing in CRM meta-data. Let’s assume that you have done the steps outlined in my last post and have made a connection between your Web Analytics visitors and your known CRM prospects/customers. Using the primary key described in my last post, you can export whatever CRM fields you care about from your CRM system and import them into your SiteCatalyst implementation as SAINT Classifications. Here, you can see that I have decided to export Industry, # of Employees, Lifetime Value and a Lifetime Value grouping (to make my reports more readable) from my CRM system and import them using the following SAINT file:

Now that I have done this, I can open my Lead Gen ID report in SiteCatalyst and look at any of these CRM fields as Classifications. Here is a view of some of my Success Events by Industry:

Here is the same data viewed by # of Employees:

Here is the same data viewed by Lifetime Value:

The same concept can apply if you are using other Web Analytics tools. Here is an example of viewing reports in Google Analytics by Job Title (in this case filtering for CIO’s):

Final Thoughts
As you can see, once you have made the connection between your Web Analytics and CRM system, there are lots of creative things you can do with respect to augmenting your traditional web analyses. I know a lot of people also do this in tools like Quantivo or Omniture Insight, but I hope this was helpful to see some of the ways to do this if you only have access to SiteCatalyst.