Like many data geeks, Google Analytics was the thing that first sparked my curiosity. Last week, Census released our Google Analytics integration. I could write a long list of game-changing applications for creating custom dimensions in Google Analytics from data in a Snoflake data warehouse but I’ve been swirling around one that I find particularly interesting. Here’s what I’m thinking.
Census, as you’d imagine, has a long sales cycle. It’s a freemium product in the middle of multiple stakeholders and touchpoints. It should come as no surprise that it’s easy for us to lose the connection between early marketing efforts and later sales outcomes. Lead scores based on demographics, activity, content consumption, or product usage have been really helpful for us to aggregate signals into a few metrics that show how similar new leads are to past customers.
The problem is that those metrics are only helpful for understanding the funnel after a trial is started. Growth is a process of expanding what works by experimenting and iterating. So to advance our experimentation towards the top of the funnel, we need valid signals early in the journey.
This is finally where Google Analytics comes in. GA is the platform we trust for web analytics and a quick way to understand attribution. But as you know, it was built for ecommerce—not for B2B SaaS. Firing a conversion based on an event gives us a really shallow view of success.
With Clearbit Reveal and account-based scoring, we can put score-based thresholds on the traffic coming in (for example high/mid/low score). With reverse ETL data integration for Google Analytics, We can map these thresholds against custom dimensions to measure the volume of high-quality traffic a given channel is bringing in and evaluate channels/costs against traffic quality. Sure the signal is imperfect (all models are) but it’s a lot stronger than the far-less-frequent conversion events. It feels a lot better to me than living and dying by button clicks.
I recently presented on how to get consistent metrics across Google Analytics, your ads platforms, and Hubspot called Marketing as a Data Product: Operational Analytics for Growth which shows how I did this. Check it out!
Yes, you can use Census for free. You can even send custom dimensions from Google Sheets.