If it’s about lead generation, Google Analytics is your holy grail for in depth data analytics of the visitors on your site. It is designed to accept online behavioral data from various number of sources and record it. But what do you do with your CRM that also has data streaming in from your offline campaigning? Wouldn’t it be great for you as a marketer who currently must look at 2 different reports, (one for website performance and another for CRM numbers) to create a unified custom report with both online and offline data? It would be ideal for an effective analytical CRM system. The Google Analytics measurement protocol empowers you by making any kind of trackable user action to GA and encapsulate the whole customer journey for tangible results in your business.
Use cases deploying measurement protocol in Google analytics are endless but we would like to discuss with you, a use case for tracking call centre conversions generated by online lead forms, tracking QR codes that are used at offline events. You will notice that once you send measurement protocol hits, you can see the data in your reports within 30 minutes.
What do we intend to do?
After submitting a lead form, some values are captured at the back-end through a call centre marketing tool. We will capture CRM tool’s data and report it with other GA metrics.
This is how
- Identify key value to merge two datasets
To merge two separate data set tables in data analytics, we need to figure out which unique identifier we should collect for each user. Since Personal Identifiable Information (PII) cannot be sent to Google Analytics in most cases Client ID is the best option. You can also choose User-ID for the scenarios that require a login.
- Capture Client ID and adding it to CRM data
A-Using GTM: You can see the steps of getting the Client ID via GTM event tag in this post. As mentioned, using GA cookie gets unreliable if there are multiple trackers on the website or if the page view tag fires before the cookie is set you may not be able to capture the CID.
B-Using HTML: You can pass the Client ID to a hidden input field in the HTML and populate it using the same script as mentioned in the post above. Whichever way you choose at the end of the day you need to see a table that has a column for Client ID.
- Configure custom dimension(s)
You need to define custom dimension(s) that corresponds to your CRM data headers. For example, if you want to see what the form type is, you need to name your custom dimension accordingly. Make sure its scope is User.
- Add CRM data to Google Analytics
This is where measurement protocol enters the scene. You can easily build and validate your hits with GA Hit Builder. Here’s an example of how an event type hit would look like:
https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=event&tid=UA-12345678&cid=123123123.12312313&ec=form&ea=submit&el=lead&cd2=whitepaper
For further information on Measurement Protocol parameters, click here.
- Make HTTP requests to measurement protocol
After validating your hits you can even send them to GA with a spreadsheet. Depending on the frequency, you may want to batch all updates to send to GA at a specific time (preferably during lowest traffic).
- Create Custom Reports
You will be able to combine default GA metrics and dimensions like sessions, goal completions or average time metrics. It works exactly like custom dimensions and you’ll be able to analyze offline as well as online data.
And how does this benefit you?
- You have a holistic approach to marketing strategy;
- You have data driven decision making;
- You can measure user activity in new environments;
- You can tie online to offline behavior;
- And you can send data from both the client and server.
We at Nabler’s are constantly working towards building customized solutions for you in data analytics to enhance your Analytical CRM system. Using measurement protocol in google analytics for custom unified reports is one of them. It’s your turn to try it now.
And if you have any unanswered questions we would love to answer them for you. Please free to write to us anytime at info@nabler.com or call us on +918049372900.