April 8, 2024August 1, 2023 by John Woods

Your GA4 B2B Reporting Care Package

By John Woods | August 1, 2023

With Universal Analytics now well on its way to live on the proverbial farm in the countryside, it’s time to get to grips with our new pet reporting system, GA4.

If you’re new to GA4 we’ll forgive you if the reporting interface sparks a little sense of, well, bewilderment if not outright panic. It’s a big change from UA and it’s hard to get oriented.

Here are a few quick tips on B2B reporting for those new to GA4 to help ease this painful transition!

1. Bite the bullet with Explorations

Whereas you could do almost everything in UA with standard reports and perhaps a few segments, the standard reports in GA4 just don’t cover everything you’ll need. Head to the “Explore” menu and invest some time to learn the custom reporting or “Explorations” part of the GA4 system. It’s a little complex but flexible and powerful. You’ll thank us once you’ve conquered the learning curve.

2. Consider using Looker Studio for reporting

If you’re going to need to create custom reports anyway, why not create them in a more powerful and flexible reporting system?

3. Active Users is the new standard user metric

And it’s a more meaningful number than UA’s “Users” metric. Similarly look to “Engaged Sessions” as a more robust metric than the old “Sessions”. Don’t expect these numbers to exactly match your old UA metrics.

4. Beware of thresholding

We see a lot of cases where GA4 standard reports are rendered almost meaningless because of GA4’s default “thresholding” behaviour. This happens when a small volume of data triggers a possible privacy consideration in the background of GA4. It’s easy to overlook this because GA4 switches thresholding on and off automatically depending on the data – so a given report might be impacted by thresholding on one day and not on another. You can’t turn thresholding off, but at least you can see when it is happening by watching for this little graphic:

Thresholding is particularly problematic for B2B where we’re often dealing with small numbers of sessions – so the thresholds cut out a lot of important data. You can often use a custom Exploration to work around this. (There’s a similar issue with “sampling”, but if you’re a B2B site you are less likely to hit this issue – it kicks in when data volumes are very large.)

5. Check your data retention settings

By default, GA4 deletes granular data after 2 months. That’s not long enough if you’re working with extended B2B sales cycles. Make sure you’ve changed that setting to the maximum allowed (currently 14 months).

6. Be alert for lingering data collection setup issues

There’s a lot of complexity around the setup of the more “advanced” aspects of GA4 like ecommerce reporting and conversion events. If you can’t get the data you want out of your reports, it’s possible the data collection setup is wrong. You might not be able to fix these issues in the reporting system.

7. Consider alternatives

Google Analytics is valuable but it’s not the only measurement game in town. In our work we like to use Microsoft Clarity to complement GA4. And there are many more options that are worth considering.

If you need help with the GA4 transition or with website measurement and reporting for B2B in general, please get in touch!

What’s Google Search Console, and why is it particularly important for B2B?

John Woods April 8, 2024

The impending death of third-party cookies – what does it mean for B2B marketers?

John Woods March 18, 2024

The Impact of Stricter DMARC Policies on B2B Email Marketing

John Woods January 30, 2024

January 12, 2023May 12, 2022 by John Woods

Why is Sharp Ahead sponsoring MeasureCamp?

By John Woods | May 12, 2022

The MeasureCamp unconference

Sharp Ahead is proudly sponsoring the MeasureCamp unconference in London on 15^th May 2022 https://london.measurecamp.org/.

MeasureCamp is an “unconference” – free to attend and self-organising – for the digital analytics community.

It’s an amazing event with around 300 digital analytics practitioners expected to attend, many travelling from overseas. The presentations will range from deeply technical (such as how to manage the upcoming switch from Universal Analytics to GA4), to quirky (like my own, on the relevance of WW2 photographic reconnaissance to the management of digital analytics!).

But why is a B2B digital marketing agency like Sharp Ahead sponsoring a digital analytics event?

It’s personal…

Many of you will know me as a pioneer from the early days of digital analytics industry. And in fact the digital analytics company I founded, Site Intelligence/iJento, was a sponsor of the very first MeasureCamp, in London in September 2012. Here’s a terrible 2012-era phone photo to prove it:

So it’s a nice symmetry for me to be a sponsor again in the tenth anniversary year. And I’ve benefitted so much from MeasureCamp over the years – making new contacts and friends, honing my technical skills around digital analytics and conversion optimisation, sparking new ideas – that it is great to give something back to the MeasureCamp community.

…but it is also business

It is true that I have two decades’ experience in digital analytics, and I still work in part as an analytics practitioner, but my work these days is much more broadly-based. When I co-founded Sharp Ahead in 2014 I had a vision that analytics skills and techniques could be put to use in an agile way, in combination with a more general commercial and marketing skillset, to design and optimise digital activities for specialist B2B companies.

That vision came true, I guess! Today, Sharp Ahead actively uses digital analytics every day as one of many techniques to design and improve digital marketing campaigns. I’m one of the team’s analytics experts but several of my colleagues are pretty handy with analytics technology as well. We also work with PPC, SEO, content marketing, marketing automation and CRO, amongst others, to help our clients achieve cost-effective results. Our team also includes designers, copywriters and website builders.

Sharp Ahead looks to work with smart generalists who enjoy using a range of skills to find the best ways to grow our clients’ businesses. I’m pleased that digital analytics still plays a big part in our work, but just as excited about the other elements of expertise that we are able to blend together in our clients’ projects.

We’re growing and looking for new clients, new team members and new partnerships. And we know that the MeasureCamp event and the community around it will be a great place to find them.

Check back on our blog soon for a report from the event. And whether you are attending MeasureCamp or not: if you know of B2B companies who might benefit from our skills, if you know of smart digital marketers looking to work in a great B2B agency, or if you have other ideas how we might work together I’d love to hear from you. Or we can just chat about WW2 photographic reconnaissance!

You can find me on LinkedIn linked.com/in/jwoods or fill in our contact form.

January 12, 2023March 24, 2021 by Jennifer Esty

Digital Spring Clean - 3 Quick Tips

Spruce up your digital marketing and stay top of mind with your customers

By Jennifer Esty | March 24, 2021

This past weekend marked the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere, so we thought we’d give you a few quick tips for your digital spring clean.

1. Tidy up your SERP (search engine results page)

This is a key part of the experience for your prospects, customers and other important stakeholders interacting with your business and if you haven’t Googled your brand name in a while, now is as good a time as any.

Here’s how to check your SERP the right way.

First, use an incognito window so you’re not biasing what you see based on previous search behaviour. Then check for these signals:

Are you in the top position (P1)?
Is anyone running an ad on your brand name?
Is your Google My Business / Knowledge Panel listing up to date with accurate contact details (phone, website, opening hours etc.)?
How are your reviews looking? Are there any that you could respond to? These are people in close contact with your business and they deserve your attention.

What if things are looking a bit dusty?

This is your shop window – if it looks unloved, you’ll be losing out to other businesses. Run a brand ad. It might seem wasteful to bid on your own brand names, but for most B2B companies, those searches are relatively low volume but very high value. Plus, those ads will keep the competitors out of your P1 spot, enable you to curate and quickly update your SERP and align it with your current campaigns and brand messaging.

Pro tip: for most B2B companies, applying a few negative keywords, for example around jobs and careers, can keep costs down and focus the campaigns on your key prospects.

2. Refresh your website (inside and out)

44% of B2B marketers say the main reason they abandon websites is that there’s no contact info immediately visible*. Unless you are selling something that can be purchased on your website, your prospects will need to speak to someone in your sales team at some point.

Make it easy for visitors to choose you with a quick look at the following:

Make your phone number clearly visible – Make it easy for visitors by clearly displaying your phone number or at least an email address in the header of your site. Or go one better and enable live chat on your site like 11 out of the 50 fastest growing B2B companies**!

Does your copyright notice still say 2020?? It’s March already and I’m still finding websites without an updated copyright notice footer. With the upheaval of the last year, if your website doesn’t have signs of recent activity, prospects could be forgiven for thinking you might not be around anymore. Update that copyright, refresh your COVID-19 message, and make sure you have a recent blog or news story prominently displayed. These are all important signals to your customers that you’re open for business and ready to help them.

Get the LinkedIn insight tag, the new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tag and Google Tag Manager (GTM) in place – These tags each have a role to play in best practice digital marketing and if you’re not using them, you’re missing out on key insights, future analytics and easy tag management. These are all ways to learn more about your customers and how to delight them on your next interaction.

3. Welcome new visitors (and then look after them)

You’ve done the hard work by getting someone who doesn’t know you to choose your website. Whether the onsite experience is perfect or not, you now have a chance to be remembered and convince your prospects that your business is the right choice for them.

One of the easiest ways to be remembered is with remarketing campaigns: even if you’re not using paid search or social for lead generation, you should run remarketing ads.

Consideration cycles for high end B2B products and services usually take months, or longer, and remarketing is the most efficient way to keep in touch with those decision makers during that time. Remind them of your brand, tell them something they might not know about your business and show them why you’re the right choice.

Pro tip: Don’t wait a year to refresh the creative and mix it up with different ad formats.

What next? - The BIG clean!

If you're looking to go a bit deeper, here are three things that are vital to digital marketing success in the coming year.

Say goodbye to Broad Match Modifier

We discussed this in a blog article back in February but if you haven’t had time to sort out your match types, you could be wasting valuable media spend. In short, Google is combining two existing match types, phrase match and broad match modifier. This means that with nuanced search terms that are standard fare for B2B search marketers, it would be very easy to bring in a lot of irrelevant clicks and quickly reduce the ROI on your campaigns. Read our top tips for sorting this out as soon as possible!

Core Web Vitals

This was another new development from Google that we flagged back in 2020 but the deadline is approaching faster than most digital marketers would like. If your site doesn’t meet Google’s criteria, or you don’t have a plan in place to make sure it will, you’ll need to think now about making a reasonable investment in speeding up your site—or risk losing valuable search rankings to better prepared competitors. If this is the first you’ve heard of CWV, read our previous blog article and then get yourself over to Google Tools for measure them!

Mystery Shopping

And last on our list of big cleans, a plea to B2B marketers everywhere. Check that your customer and prospect contact channels work. Does someone answer your phone during business hours? How quickly do you respond to lead enquiries? Is your online chat staffed consistently? I know what you’re thinking, this is ridiculous of course the answer is yes. But when was the last time you checked? Do some mystery shopping and find out for yourself. In the high end B2B market, one missed phone call or a few days’ delay on replying to a form fill, could be the difference between a successful or failed campaign.

*https://komarketing.com/files/b2b-web-usability-report-2015.pdf

**https://www.drift.com/blog/fastest-growing-b2b-companies-report/

We work with intelligent marketing managers to make budgets go further and cut your cost per lead.

If you have any questions on your own digital spring clean, get in touch for a free 30-minute B2B consult.

October 31, 2023November 5, 2020 by John Woods

Google Analytics 4: what you need to know today

By John Woods | November 5, 2020

In October, Google announced the introduction of Google Analytics 4, their first major change to Analytics in almost 10 years. The move formalises the beta version of Google Analytics App plus Web with a new interface and machine learning.

Here’s what you need to know:

The first thing you’ll notice when entering Google Analytics 4 is a sleek and modern interface. The redesign makes it easier to use and more accessible than its predecessor, Universal Analytics.

Behind the design, GA4 introduces a major expansion to the machine learning capabilities in Google’s analytics offering. While it is still too early to fully understand GA4’s potential, it’s an exciting addition.
GA4 also sees a complete re-haul of the data collection architecture.

With more apps, web apps, ecommerce stores, and complex websites circling the Google-sphere, GA4 looks to plug the hole in Google’s offering by collecting data on the complex user journeys in apps and highly interactive websites with minimal set up.

The clunky Goal Tracking in Universal Analytics has been removed to make way for simple-to-set-up Event and Conversion tracking. This allows user behaviour such as logging in or browsing products to be recognised easily.

But there is a catch.

GA4 is so fundamentally different to Universal Analytics that it requires adding a new tag to your website. And with it, a fresh start on Analytics.

Google has made finding the new tag super easy, but when you add it to your website, your GA4 dashboard will be blank. You’ll need to start afresh collecting data from the moment you set up the new tag.

Thankfully, adding the GA4 tag to your website doesn’t stop Universal Analytics from working – the two run in tandem. But with GA4 eventually looking to replace Universal Analytics entirely, and with no clear way to migrate data (yet), we recommend adding the GA4 tag soon so you can build up historic data when the change does come.

We don’t currently know when Google will start decommissioning Universal Analytics, but with historical data being a pivotal factor in how useful analytics is, you’ll need to prepare.

What to do next:

Add the GA4 Tag to your website
Recreate your remarketing audiences in GA4 so they can start to build up
Add event and conversion tracking
Set up Google Tag Manager (not required but best practice)

In the meantime, we’ll keep an eye out for more information on GA4 and the future of Analytics. Please follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter to stay in the know!