The SegMetrics Difference

How to shift from web analytics to funnel analytics

SegMetrics takes a holistic view of your customer journey, allowing you to connect every click, purchase and touchpoint back to an actual person in your marketing funnel.

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Most marketers spend ages mastering website analytics such as GA, learning all the different variables, terms and metrics. It’s great for measuring website interactions and how visitors behave.

But, it’s weak for analysing your whole funnel. The attribution often disagrees with your other tools such as advertising or email platforms and limited data is shared between funnel steps.

As a funnel analytics tool, SegMetrics gives you the ability to look at how customers progress through the whole marketing journey, not just website interactions.

This “touchpoint-based” analytics is a powerful new way to understand your marketing, especially compared to traditional “click-based” web analytics. Let’s look at how a slight change in viewpoint helps bring all your marketing together.

Core Tenets of SegMetrics

The Four Principles of Funnel Analytics

In order to make accurate marketing decisions, it’s important to understand how your metrics are being calculated. Marketers need actionable, valuable and accurate analytics data to guide their decisions. SegMetrics has four core tenets that all analytics data should follow.

#1 People are the Cornerstone of Marketing

In the end, all data must connect to a single person in your marketing. This prevents duplicate conversions, and inaccurate attribution, and allows for true lifetime value.

#2 Data Must Not Be Trapped in Silos

Siloed Data can't be used to make decisions. When all your data is in different systems that don't talk to each other, you can't create a comprehensive user journeyand are forced to juggle metrics between system.

#3 Metrics Must Be Quickly Verifiable

Data you can't trust is worthless. For any metric, you should be able to instantly view a list of the individual users, clicks, events or purchases for that report.

#4 The Question is as Important as the Answer

Understanding what questions you need to ask is often more important than the answer. Effective analytics should inspire you to ask new questions about your marketing, and answer them in real-time.

#1 People, Not Events, are the Cornerstone of Marketing

Moving to People-Centric Analytics

The majority of marketing analytic tools on the markets focus on a single aspect of your marketing funnel, whether that's a page view, an ad click, or an email open.

Focusing on one aspect of the funnel gives these tools a simple way to focus on these simple metrics, but excludes the larger customer journey through your marketing funnel.

Your marketing funnels are more complex than just the landing page's bounce rate.

When we look at Google Analytics, we can easily see how many visitors came to our website, and how many of them viewed the thank-you page. But the more important questions remain:

  • How many of those were users who are already on my list?

  • Am I gaining new traffic or not?

  • We can even reverse the question: How many of my best customers are regular readers of the blog?

In marketing analytics, the central aspect is not what happens, but rather who is making it happen. People are the central force in your marketing.

The SegMetrics Data Model

Making the the person the cornerstone of your marketing gives us two major benefits:

First, we get a better understanding of how multiple touchpoints influence lifetime value in your marketing funnel — regardless of platform. By creating user segments, we can easily discover trends like “people who attend the webinar from facebook are 60% more likely to buy than organic traffic,” or “35% of my VIP product customers upgrade to the one-on-one coaching within the first 2 months.”

Second, with person-based analytics, we're now able to segment on any part of the journey, and any aspect of the customer. We’re not limited to looking at our analytics only through a “top of funnel” lens or a “nurture sequence” lens.

We can pick any event, or any aspect of a person, from any data source, and create a segment to find similar contacts in real time.

SegMetrics' proprietary analytics engine brings in the marketing data from all the tools you use, to create a single, holistic, customer journey to make the cornerstone of your marketing analytics — something that simply can't be done with event-centric analytics tools.


#2 Break Data Out of Silos

Get Away from Comparative Analytics

There are two major types of marketing analytics: Comparative and Relational. Comparative Analytics is when you look at numbers in two different data silos and make a calculation of your conversion rate. When the data we're measuring is simple, or there isn't much room for variance, Comparative Analytics can be quick and effective.

But when the questions you’re asking get more complicated, and the variance increases, the accuracy of this data drops significantly — almost to the point of being useless.

For example, if a sales page has both paid and organic traffic, as well as visits from new and existing users, we’ll still know the “Conversion Rate” of the sales page, but Comparative Analytics doesn't answer the question of which segments are converting better.

With Comparative Analytics Data, you’re making a guess about what people do in your funnel. And while you’re spending time guessing, you’re wasting both time and money going down a path based on bad information.

#3 Metrics Must Be Quickly Verifiable

Why You’ll Never Get Accurate
Data from Google Analytics
& Facebook

Comparative Analytics is the reason that you’ll never be able to match the metrics between all the tools in your marketing funnel. Google, Facebook, Unbounce, and more all rely on their data, and ONLY their data, with no idea of what else is going on in your marketing.

So when you see 100 new leads in Facebook, that really means that 100 people have landed on your thank you page. Facebook doesn’t know if those 100 people were already on your list, or if they actually opted in through Google, or a pixel fired twice, or they sent a link to a friend, or any hundreds of other issues that can cause the data to be inaccurate.

Even something as simple as comparing the number of new visitors in Google Analytics and Facebook is futile, as both systems define “new” differently.

Worst of all, there’s no way to verify any of those discrepancies. Because the data in these silos is protected, and often anonymous, there’s no way to know that the 60 people in Facebook are different from the 40 in Google, or the path that any of them took to conversion.

And forget about tracking anyone who purchased through an offline event, or through a non-direct channel such as a recurring payment.

That’s why it’s important that for any report in SegMetrics, you can always pull up the exact contacts, purchases or events that make up the report, giving you confidence that there's no "doubling up" or "phantom users" that you see with other systems.

Analytics is about trust, and when you see a number that you don’t expect, you need to be able to instantly see how that number was calculated.

#4 The Question is as Important as the Answer

Quickly Segment Your Users to Find Your Best and Worst Performers

Many analytic tools require you to ask specific questions before you can get any answers. In some systems, you have to have that question before you even start collecting data. As marketers, we both know that knowing what we’re looking for ahead of time is almost never going to happen.

That’s why SegMetrics is built around the idea that your metrics inform the questions you need to ask to improve your marketing, and that when you have one of those “huh, what about…”moments, you shouldn’t have to wait for your questions to be answered.

While KPIs are the best way to measure the trajectory and performance of your business, real improvements in your marketing from those “what about...” moments -- finding the outliers in your data to discover your best and works performers. That’s why one of SegMetrics’ core features is the ability to take any metric and break it down by any dimension in real-time, to identify the segments and actions that make leads more valuable.

Why are finding these outliers important? Let's take a simple example of a marketing funnel that has a 50% conversion rate. If you have a marketing funnel with a 50% conversion rate, you’re doing great! But what happens if we look closer, and we break those leads down by where they came from, and we see that none of our paid leads converted, but every single lead from social posts did.

Without finding those outliers, we would have never known that we’re wasting all our ad-spend. The top-level KPI is necessary for gauging improvement, but it doesn’t give us any information on what to do next -- only segmenting and finding our outliers gives us the actionable information we need to improve our marketing.

Filter on Any Aspect of a Contact

Because finding those outlying segments is the key to effectively improving your marketing, it’s important to be able to filter your data on any aspect of the customer journey.

How do people from ads perform on the webinar, versus organic leads? Are leads in the 20-35 year old range more likely to respond to texts than email? Are leads who signup from aol addresses really worthless?

With other analytics systems that rely on comparative data, these questions are impossible to answer without exporting data into spreadsheets and comparing lists of leads. In order to get true, valuable, segmentation of your leads and marketing, you need to use a system that is aware of every step of your marketing funnel, and connects with all the tools you use.


Get the Full Picture of Your Customer Journey

Getting accurate data out of your marketing analytics is a challenge for even the most sophisticated marketers. It’s even harder when your tools don’t talk to each other, and you can’t get a full picture of your entire customer journey.

SegMetrics bridges the gap between the top, middle and bottom of your funnel -- to give you an unrivaled view into how each step in your marketing performs, who is engaging with your messaging, and who isn’t.

SegMetrics isn’t for everyone, but one thing is sure -- there is no easier way to get a complete understanding of your marketing funnel, from top to bottom.

Try us out with a free trial. You won’t be disappointed.

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