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Why Microsoft Clarity belongs in your B2B digital marketing tech stack

By John Woods  |  November 17, 2023
The power of session recording for optimising B2B campaigns

We love Microsoft Clarity. Chances are, it belongs in your B2B digital marketing tech stack.

It delivers useful insights that can drive meaningful performance improvements. And it’s free to use, and easy to set up. So it’s a quick win for B2B digital marketing teams.

Microsoft what-ity?

Not heard of Microsoft Clarity before? It’s a web analytics tool that uses session recording techniques. That is, it records the details of what actually happens within the user’s browser – scrolling, typing, clicks and so on. And then reports those back in aggregate form so that one can understand how a web page is being used by your actual web visitors.

There are many similar tools in the market: Hotjar, Inspectlet and Crazy Egg are some of the better-known ones. Those are all good tools and are worth considering if you have advanced requirements. But Clarity is a great entry-level session recording tool for these reasons:

  • It’s free forever, so there’s no subscription cost to worry about;
  • It is built and supported by Microsoft, which provides comfort around the compliance and privacy aspects;
  • It is very easy to set up and use, so you can get value very quickly without a huge amount of technical knowledge.
Why we love Clarity and session recording

“Conventional” web analytics tools like Google Analytics can tell you things like the “engagement rate” and “average time on page” for a web page. But those measures don’t really tell you whether the page is doing its job or WHY a badly-performing page might be failing. And they don’t tell you how to improve the page. (I went into some detail about the limitations of Google Analytics for niche B2B campaigns in my recent GA4ward webinar .)

Session recording gives a much more direct, actionable view of page performance and can point you towards specific improvements.

Here’s an example of a Clarity report for the mobile version of one of our own landing pages:

The colours and numbers on this “scroll heat map” show the percentage of visitors reaching each vertical position on the page. So for example only 25% of our visitors scrolled down far enough to see the “Marketing Automation” heading.

Take a moment to look at the image. Can you see any issues?

For me, this Clarity report has highlighted a design problem with this page. Only 41% of mobile visitors are seeing the text (in the yellow/green area of the colour coding) which says “We’re a full service digital marketing agency…”. That’s important text! Without it, the offer of a free B2B digital marketing consultation makes a lot less sense. A person might view the page without scrolling and decide not to bother taking any action, whereas if they’d seen that extra copy, they might have been persuaded to go ahead and book a consultation.

Frustratingly this import text is only JUST below the fold. You can see from the heatmap that if it were only a line or two higher up, 75% of visitors would see it – almost twice as many!

This Clarity report not only diagnoses the problem, but it allows us to come up with some potential solutions. In this case, we’re going to trim down the opening section so that it uses a bit less vertical space, allowing the “We’re a full service…” text to show above the fold for all users. That’s an easy change that will only take us a few minutes to implement. We’ll test that change and expect to see an improvement in conversion rates as a result.

Imagine instead all I’d told you was that this page had a high bounce rate or a low engagement rate. You would know there was an issue, but you’d have no idea what aspect of the page’s design was to blame, and so nowhere to start for choosing potential solutions. Most likely, the page would have stayed unchanged.

Not just scroll heat maps

We find these scroll heat maps incredibly useful for B2B landing pages, where the user journey is often just a single page and where we have difficult tradeoffs to consider in information architecture – which content to prioritize above the fold, in particular.

There are many other useful features in Clarity, including:

  • Recording and replay of a whole user session (across multiple pages) to look at navigation issues
  • Reports on where clicks and taps occur on the page
  • Automatic detection of “rage clicks” that suggest when a person has become frustrated with a page
  • Filters to segment traffic to look at specific pages and visits from specific campaigns

These features are all enabled as standard, so you access to them all as soon as you have put the basic Clarity setup in place – there are no complicated setup decisions to make.

Getting started with Clarity

If I’ve convinced you that Clarity has a place in your tech stack, please give it a go! The setup could hardly be easier:

  1. Sign up for a free account at https://clarity.microsoft.com/
  2. Step through a tiny number of simple set-up questions
  3. Install a single JavaScript tag on your site, ideally via Google Tag Manager
  4. Wait a while for some useful data to turn up – this might need a few days or even weeks if you are running niche, low volume campaigns
  5. Check out the heatmaps and session recordings in the Clarity interface and start looking for insights!

Microsoft have given careful thought to the GDPR / privacy / compliance aspects of the system, so while you shouldn’t take these for granted, the use of Clarity shouldn’t cause too many concerns for your company lawyers. And the technology has negligible impact on page speed for the end user. So it’s hard to think of any material downside to the use of Clarity. And the upsides can be huge – if you discover and fix a page design issue that improves conversion rates by even a few percent, that’s extra ROI on every digital campaign.

We’ll return to some other ways to use Clarity for B2B campaign optimisation in the future. For now, if you’d like any help with Clarity or any other aspect of B2B marketing, we’d love to hear from you! 

A/B Testing B2B Marketers
A/B Testing B2B Marketers

A/B Testing for B2B Marketers

By Jennifer Esty  |  October 27, 2023

In this article we explore A/B testing for B2B marketers and why you might be wasting your time, or worse, believing the wrong outcomes.

What is A/B Testing? 

A/B testing, also sometimes referred to as split testing or bucket testing, is a research methodology used to determine which of two variants is more likely to produce the optimal outcome. 

In most cases the A version is the control (or often the live) variant and the B version is the test or “new” variant. 

Traditionally A/B testing is a very effective way for marketers to test and optimise all sorts of outcomes, including copy, conversion and usability features or changes. 

Quite simply, you put both variants live, split the traffic between them, and the version that performs best wins.

Why it doesn’t add up

The methodology is very compelling for marketers and we love the idea as much as anyone, but the hard truth is that more often than not, it’s simply not workable for B2B marketers. 

The reason lies in the maths around statistical significance.  

We’ll dig into the details of the mathematics behind this challenge in a future blog article (sign up for our newsletter here if you don’t want to miss it). 

But here is a simple illustration of the problem:  

If you had a campaign where the A variant resulted in 1200 conversions and the B variant resulted in 800 conversions, you would choose A the version as the winner. You could also implement that version with a high level of confidence that you are doing the right thing for the success of your marketing activity. 

But let’s consider another scenario. 

If your A version had three conversions and your B version had two conversions, you would have very low confidence in the outcome of the test. 

Mathematically speaking, the ratio of the two scenarios is the same! A has performed 50% better than B in both tests. But I think we’d all agree that a 3 vs 2 “victory” doesn’t prove anything.  

For your A/B testing to be effective, you need a reasonable large number of conversions to get a meaningful result—otherwise you may as well just toss a coin. 

You can calculate the exact numbers with a bit of statistical knowledge, but a good rule of thumb is a minimum of 100 conversions for a meaningful outcome. 

How much longer?

So, for high value low volume B2B organisations the reality is that it could take three to four months or even longer to achieve that meaningful threshold of conversions. 

And during that time that particular marketing activity is locked down, because otherwise it would invalidate the test. So you sacrifice your agility while the test slowly grinds on. 

Worse, if the world changes around you during this months-long testing period, including anything from competitor price changes, feature rollouts, new opportunities or significant economic changes could invalidate the whole test. Maybe the A version was the winner BEFORE your competitor rolled out that new feature last month, but now the B version is stronger. Your test is wrecked. 

Sadly, the numbers are working against you as high value, low volume B2B marketer. 

Will it ever work?

All that said, there can be a place for A/B testing in your marketing mix.  

For example it can prove useful at the top of your funnel where you have higher volume activity, for example content downloads, webinar sign ups, or search ad copy. 

That said, beware the B2B clickbait trap, whereby you’re making changes to your paid campaigns to flatter your click through rates—all at the expense of relevant, quality leads. 

If you want to find out more how to optimise and test your B2B digital marketing campaigns or have any questions about B2B digital best practice, we’d love to chat. Get in touch!

Blog post illustration of a monitor, coffee cup and plant.
Blog post illustration of a monitor, coffee cup and plant.

GA4 & GTM Support in 3rd Party Martech

By John Woods  |  September 29, 2023

Martech vendors: you’ve let your clients down, but most of all you’ve let yourselves down. I’m not angry, just disappointed. I know you can do better than this! 

I’m talking about support for Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics (GA4), of course.

Martech vendors could, and should, do a better job of supporting GTM and GA4 integration in their products. And there’s less excuse than ever, because the vendors have all had to rework their integrations in the last year or so to support the migration from Universal Analytics to GA4. 

I work with a lot of different marketing technology products and I’m often helping clients integrate them with their analytics and tracking systems. I’m increasingly frustrated at how few of these products offer proper support for GA4 and GTM. Or rather – at how often they almost do the right thing, but let themselves down in some way. 

If the martech vendors got their act together, it would be easier and cheaper to integrate the analytics stack with their tools, and clients and agencies could spend more time extracting value from their martech stack and less time building and maintaining integrations. And honestly, it’s not that hard to do it right! Let me explain. 

I’m talking about the sort of martech that provides a component of digital user experience that we might reasonably want to track with digital analytics. So for instance an e-commerce shopping platform like Shopify or Magento; an online booking engine like Bookeo or Arlo; a specialist content management system like Unbounce; or a live chat system like Zoho. In all these cases the martech platform looks after some interesting user interactions, and we want to record these user interactions in a suitable way in the analytics platform.

Because the martech platform is usually a bit of a black box, we need it to provide some way to communicate its internal view of user actions to the analytics system. For example in a live chat system, the chat technology should send events like “user requested a chat” and “user contact details were captured”. In my view there are two different use cases here:

1. Suppose I’m a small organization with a limited budget and no in-house capacity for integration work. I want a simple, push-button integration with GA4 that “just works” and that allows me to sensibly report on and analyse the use of the martech component. It should look like this:

GA4 Tracking Simple Demonstration

There might be one or two choices to make about some of the detail, but basically the tool just needs to know my GA4 tracking ID. Then behind the scenes it can send appropriate events to GA4 using the API.

2. Alternatively, suppose I have the resources and expertise to take a more sophisticated approach to tracking and analytics. In that case I want to use Google Tag Manager, so I can control things for myself. (This might be for some very important reasons – for example perhaps I am handling consent management via GTM.) So then I want this sort of option in my martech tools:

GA4 Tracking Simple Demonstration

And behind the scenes the tool should send appropriate events to GTM using the API. I then add my own triggers and tags in GTM to pass those events on to GA4 and to any other tracking tools.

Now you might think these two use cases look quite similar. And indeed, they are! They require almost identical implementation work within the martech tool. 

So: MARTECH VENDORS SHOULD BE ABLE TO SUPPORT BOTH OF THESE USE CASES. That is: they should provide an option to send events directly to GA4, and a separate option to send events to GTM. (Some people may even want to use both, though that’s a bit of a weird combo.) 

With both options, all users are happy. The small resource-strapped team can get a decent GA4 setup in place with just a few button pushes. The team that can handle more complexity can use GTM to get things exactly the way they want them – including for example GTM-based consent management, data integration via the data layer, or even server-side tagging. And all the complexity about the martech tool itself sits within the vendor’s black box, with no need for complex reverse engineering or “screen scraping”. 

Unfortunately this isn’t happening yet. Martech vendors are picking and choosing their approach to GA4 and GTM. Here are a couple of examples I’ve worked with recently:

Arlo: Arlo is a specialist booking platform. They used to have a built-in Universal Analytics implementation with no GTM support. With the move to GA4 they have released an excellent GTM integration. But they now have no built-in GA4 integration at all! So to use Arlo with GA4 requires use of GTM – great if you already have it, but bad news if you just want a simple GA4 setup.

Shopify: this one is particularly disappointing. Shopify support both GA4 and GTM. But here’s what they say in their GTM documentation:

To use Google Tag Manager with your Shopify Plus online store, you need to do the following:

Use Shopify’s integration for Google Analytics and Meta Pixel instead of using them with Google Tag Manager.  

So you can use GTM with Shopify, but if you do, you must not deploy your GA4 tag via GTM. That’s against the whole philosophy of GTM! And makes it impossible, for example, to use GTM to manage consent.

Unbounce: we work with Unbounce a lot for standalone landing pages, and it’s a great tool. But again it fumbles GA4/GTM support. There’s good built-in GA4 support that sends sensible conversion events. But if you want to use GTM, you have to reverse engineer the triggers to figure out all the user actions. 

I’m sure that there are vendors who’ve done the right thing and provide both GA4 and GTM options. But I’m yet to find one! If you know of any, please chip in on the comments and I’ll gladly give credit where it’s due. 

Let’s put some pressure on our vendors to get this right. If you’re working with martech tools that don’t have proper GA4 and GTM support, get in touch with the vendor and send them a feature request. (You’re welcome to include a link to this blog!)

Unicorns, Donkeys and Visual Agility for B2B Marketing
Unicorns, Donkeys and Visual Agility for B2B Marketing

Unicorns, Donkeys and Visual Agility for B2B Marketing

By John Woods  |  September 14, 2023
How our house illustration style enabled us to seize a promotional opportunity at short notice

The Sharp Ahead team turned around a great thought leadership piece for our own marketing last week, producing a really impactful and novel presentation within a 48 hour turnaround time. You can see the end result here. It’s a good case study in B2B marketing agility so I wanted to share the story of how we made it happen.

Why we love illustrations for B2B marketing  

Illustrations are great for B2B marketing when other forms of visual messaging can’t do the job. They allow complex and abstract ideas to be expressed visually in ways that photography often can’t address.

At Sharp Ahead we’ve long been advocates of developing a house illustration style and an associated branded illustration library. You can see many examples of the “illos” that we use in our own marketing around this website. And we’ve developed similar approaches for several clients. These illustration libraries become reusable assets that can be applied over and over again in campaign execution.

A B2B marketing challenge with a tight timescale

One of the key benefits of an illustration library is agility, the ability to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. Our recent thought leadership piece is a great example of this. Let me take you through the timeline. 

The opportunity: my friend Phil Pearce (who runs specialist digital analytics agency MeasureMindsasked me to speak at an online conference, GA4Ward. Another speaker had dropped out at short notice. This was a great opportunity to promote Sharp Ahead’s thought leadership to a large audience, but I had only 2 days to prepare my presentation. 

The challenge: I had a rough idea what I wanted to say at the conference, but the only relevant slide deck I had was 7 years old (!) and didn’t reflect our current branding and positioning. Plus I needed to add some completely new material. We didn’t have much time available but I wanted the end result to look professional and on-brand, as well as providing interesting and entertaining content for the conference attendees. So we needed to be very agile! 

Illustrations enhance agility

We’d already invested some time in building up an illustration library, so we had a great start. I was able to put the main framework of my slide deck together using ready-to-go illustrations. This gave me about 80% of the material I needed. But there were still some key bits missing: 

  • I needed some graphics to show the difference between high quality and low quality B2B leads 
  • I needed a slide to illustrate the chaotic and confusing nature of the B2B sales process 

We didn’t have anything suitable for those in our existing illustration library. But we do have the luxury of an in-house illustrator! So I was able to brief our illustrator to quickly create the new illustrations we needed and get those turned around within a couple of hours. 

The first missing part needed a bit of thought. We had a brainstorm as a team and settled on the idea of “unicorns” to represent the high-quality leads and “donkeys” to represent the lower-quality leads. 

Some quick work from our illustrator gave me some new graphical elements from which I was able to quickly build up the diagrams I needed in my slides. Here’s an example (showing a campaign with an 20:80 split of good:bad leads): 

Unicorns Illustration

I love how the unicorns and donkeys look kinda similar at first glance – which reflects the truth of B2B lead generation in that good leads and bad are often mixed up in a single “conversions” metric.

Finally our illustrator was able to address the second missing part with another custom illustration to show the chaotic nature of the B2B sales process (with guest appearances from our new friends the unicorn and the donkey!):

Diagram

The end result: a great thought leadership presentation, built from scratch in just over a day, with some wonderful visual metaphors that we’ll be using again and again.

Like what you see?

I hope I’ve convinced you that a branded illustration library is a great asset for B2B marketing.

We help clients develop illustration libraries and we can provide on-demand illustrator support for the occasions – like the one I’ve described above – when you need to expand the library at short notice for a special project. If you’d like to use illustrations to power up your own B2B marketing, we’d love to help – please get in touch!

If you have questions about B2B email metrics or need any other help with your B2B email marketing, please get in touch!

B2B Email Metrics Part One - The Most Important Metrics
B2B Email Metrics Part One - The Most Important Metrics

B2B Email Metrics Part Two – The most important metrics 

By John Woods  |  August 16, 2023

I explained in part one about the Big Open Rate Lie and why that means Open Rate is a bad metric for a B2B email campaign. The good news is that there are plenty of other metrics that you can – and should – use to measure B2B email campaign performance. I’ll go through them briefly now, starting with the most important.

Email campaign metric #1: Spam Complaint Rate 

Your email campaign system should be able to tell you how many spam complaints – that is, manual complaints raised by humans, not automatic spam filters – your campaign has generated. So if for example you sent 1,000 emails and generated 1 spam complaint, your spam complaint rate (SCR) is 1/1,000=0.1%. 

In a perfect world, a compliant and ethical marketer should never get a spam complaint. All your email addresses should be correctly opted-in. And every recipient should recognise the emails you send as legitimate and valuable messages. 

In reality, one can’t avoid the occasional spam complaint. There can be misunderstandings. Or someone might end up on your email database by mistake. Or in an extreme situation a recipient might maliciously raise a spam complaint. So your SCR won’t be exactly zero. But it should be a very, very low number. I’d see an SCR even as low as 0.1% as a cause for concern. 

If your campaigns generate any significant number of spam complaints it’s likely your email campaign provider will warn you that your account might be paused or even suspended. This is because email service providers have to protect the reputation of their systems for all of their subscribers, and spam complaints harm that reputation. But don’t wait for a warning and risk a ban. Monitor every campaign send for spam complaints. If you notice any hint of an uptick in spam complaints, take some action to improve your processes and the quality of your database.

Email campaign metric #2: hard bounce rate 

Your email campaign system should tell you this number for each send. 

A “hard bounce” means you sent an email to an address that cannot receive it for some permanent reason. (This is distinct from a “soft bounce” which happens with a temporary problem, like a mail server being temporarily down for maintenance.) 

This shouldn’t happen very often, but you will naturally get a few hard bounces for a B2B email campaign. For example, perhaps a person has left their job and their corporate email address has been deactivated. 

As with spam complaints, your hard bounce rate should normally be a very small percentage – ideally 0.1% or lower. But there are some circumstances when it might be a little higher, especially if you are sending to a list that hasn’t been used in a while. 

Most email systems will automatically remove or suppress a contact that generates a hard bounce. If yours doesn’t do this, or if you are using multiple email systems (so that a hard bounce detected by one system might not be removed from the other systems’ lists), you might need to take manual steps to remove or suppress hard bounces. 

Any increase in hard bounces will often cause a warning from your email system provider, because it’s a signal of potential spamminess and bad contact list hygiene. Don’t keep sending to a list that will cause hard bounces. 

Monitor your hard bounce rate for every campaign send and take action if you see a spike. 

If you need to send to a B2B email list that’s not been used in a while, consider using a list checking service like Neverbounce to reduce the risk of excessive hard bounces.

Email campaign metric #3: unsubscribe rate
Again the unsubscribe rate for each campaign should be reported by your email campaign system. If you send, say, 1,000 emails, and two people unsubscribe, then your unsubscribe rate is 2/1,000 = 0.2%. 
Getting occasional unsubscribes from a B2B email list is a fact of marketing life. It’s not necessarily saying something is wrong. Perhaps a person has changed job role and your product is no longer relevant to them. Perhaps a person is moving to a different company and intends to resubscribe with their new corporate email address. But a high unsubscribe rate is a danger sign – perhaps your emails are too boring, or too frequent, or insufficiently targeted. 
In general I’d like to see an unsubscribe rate as a very low number, say 0.2% or lower. But there are some circumstances in which it might be a little higher. In particular if you’ve made a big change to your product or service, or if you are emailing a “cool” list that hasn’t been used for quite a while, you may see a higher level of unsubscribes at first. 
Keep an eye on unsubscribe rates and take action if you see a sustained high level or any sudden increase.
Email campaign metric #4: clickthrough rate
The clickthrough rate (CTR) is a well-named metric – it’s the number of times that a link in your email is clicked. 
Most email marketing systems will report on this number. But in some cases you might need to use a separate analytics platform (like Google Analytics) to measure it. 
There are some nuances here. For example, if the same person clicks on 5 different links in an email that you send, do you count that as 5 clicks or only 1 for the purposes of measuring CTR? Different systems will handle this in different ways. 
Clickthrough rate is a useful measure but it’s very hard to give any general guidance about a “good” CTR for B2B email campaigns. Some emails are very self-contained and informational. They don’t need to be clicked on in order to achieve their marketing objectives. Other emails are trying hard to get someone to take action by clicking on a link. In those cases, the likely CTR depends very much on the level of commitment required by the call to action – “click here to read more” is likely to get a lot more clicks than “click here to contact sales”. 
So please measure and monitor the CTRs from your B2B email campaigns, but be aware there’s no set target value for CTR. Rather you should compare CTRs from similar emails with similar calls-to-action over time. If you have a big enough email list and send to it consistently over a long period of time, differences in CTRs may help you to identify better- or worse-performing content.
Email campaign metric #5: post-click activity
If your B2B email campaign is primarily designed to get a prospect to take some action, then “post click activity” is the ultimate measure of its value. That is: when a person not only clicks on an email, but also goes on to take the desired follow-up action. This might be, for example, filling in a form to download a white paper, or booking a slot on a webinar, or asking for a sales callback. Often this activity would be considered a “conversion” of some sort. 
Some email marketing systems have facilities for tracking post-click activity (usually by adding a special tag or tracking pixel to a form completion page), but often you’ll need to use a separate analytics system like Google Analytics to track post-click activity and conversions. 
It’s important to track post-click activity but there are some caveats: 
  • If you are marketing to a niche audience, you won’t get many conversions from any given email send. That doesn’t mean your email sends are a failure! B2B sales and consideration cycles are often very long. You need to keep engaging the same audience over an extended period. 
  • Your emails have value even if a person doesn’t “convert”. Just seeing your company’s name in an email inbox, or reading some useful content in the email preview, will have a positive branding effect for many people in your list. Your email campaigns may help to convert them at a later date via a different touchpoint.
  • There are many technical limitations to tracking a person’s digital journey. Some people might see your email on one device but decide to follow up using a different device, for example. You won’t see this value attributed to the email campaign in your conversion metrics. 
So conversion and post-click email metrics are best used in a relative way – if one type of campaign gets twice as many downloads per email sent than another, it is likely to be twice as effective. Don’t rely on them as absolute measures of email ROI.
Summing it up
Email metrics are complex to understand and to use. I hope I’ve given you at least a flavour of the top priority metrics and some of the pitfalls to avoid. We’ll return to some of these themes in future blog posts.

If you have questions about B2B email metrics or need any other help with your B2B email marketing, please get in touch!

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