How to Measure your Account Based Marketing Reach
A guest post by Joel Burke, Partner and Analytics Lead @ Outshine
At Outshine, we help B2B companies build and optimize their marketing automation, advertising , and analytics stack. Increasingly, this has involved optimizing the acquisition and conversion funnel around a defined set of target accounts – Account Based Marketing (ABM).
One of the biggest challenges our clients face with ABM, is tracking and reporting on their marketing initiatives.
- What channel is driving the most engagement from target accounts?
- What content or ad creative performs best for those accounts?
These are questions that are very hard to answer with traditional analytics. Especially at the top of the funnel, before email signup or form submission.
For one client - One2Team – an enterprise collaboration and project management tool - this is especially important.
The good news? There are ways to shorten the feedback cycle to identify effective marketing techniques and channels more quickly, allowing us to move seamlessly between insight and application in our work with One2Team.
Gone are the days of gathering audience insights based solely on how a visitor to your website identifies themselves. We no longer have to wait for a potential customer to fill out a contact form or download a piece of content to learn what company they work for and which industry they’re in.
(The problem with doing this, of course, is that plenty of people submit forms with fake company names, an old email address, an incorrect phone number, or, they don’t submit a form at all).
Optimize marketing efforts using de-anonymized data
For One2Team, it can be tough to get a prospect early on in their research to request a demo, or download a gated asset.
But just as those actions are valuable, there’s also tremendous value in knowing that marketing activities have successfully reached companies on their target list as part of an account-based marketing strategy.
Clearbit Reveal tells us whether or not the campaigns we’re running are reaching the companies we want to reach by de-anonymizing visitors according to the company they work for (determined by their IP address at the time of their site visit), allowing One2Team to know each and every time someone from a company on their target accounts list visits their website.
This is especially insightful for anyone who uses an outbound marketing approach to reaching prospective customers, because now they have an understanding of which activities (i.e. organic search, email campaigns, paid search, and so on) drive traffic from their target accounts.
Connecting Clearbit and Google Analytics
For One2Team, we’ve taken a list of target companies and applied an Include Filter for Company Names (in Clearbit data) plus a regular expression (regex) in Google Analytics to build a dashboard segmented by each of the companies we want to target with our ads.
The regex says to Google Analytics that, “If a company name contains Ford, include the traffic in our report.” Here’s a tool we use to maintain simple regular expressions.
This is helpful because of the issues associated with company names. There are plenty of companies that go by many different names—think variations in official vs. shorthand names, various entities and subsidiaries.
From there we copy and paste the company name regex statement into a custom report in Google Analytics.
A report made in Data Studio for our client One2Team showing channels driving traffic from companies from their targeted accounts list.
Using this data we can easily validate the accuracy of our targeted campaigns to ensure the ads we’re running are reaching the right people. We also get answers to important questions like, “What percentage of our ad spend is reaching our target accounts?” or "How are our target accounts engaging with our site?".
This helps prove marketing’s ROI and contribution to revenue, and allows marketers to work more closely with sales to generate the right type of leads.
Outshine drives revenue for high-growth B2B companies using advertising, analytics, and automation. Learn more at outshine.ca.
