CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools – SalesForce, Hubspot CRM, etc. – and other off-domain systems hold integral data in the value of a customer and where that customer came from. What are “off-domain integrations”? When utilizing analytics for attribution of marketing performance, visibility ends when someone leaves your site – this applies to companies whose primary site objective and sales process is to generate a lead or request for information (RFI) on their site. Once the lead is created, analytic visibility ends – or is disrupted and now managed in a different data set – separated from marketing insights required for proper attribution. Off-domain integrations refer to the connectioin of your primary analytics hub to off-line and back-end systems to allow for communication and visibility through all internal and sales steps.

Let’s say for example that you spend large sums each month in paid search (5 figures monthly and up) to keep your sales team and the pipeline pumping. If you’re not leveraging off-domain integrations – such as a CRM, or a system where final sales are recorded – it’s more than likely you will end up paying and optimizing for traffic and conversions from non-qualified and not interested visitors.

This happens quite often, since most businesses lack visibility through the final purchase or sale. When this data is missing it’s the equivalent to when performance was based on bounce rate, pages viewed – although engagement can look strong at these metrics, it’s still not an indication of action or intent.

Doing something about it

There are 2 main components with a mandatory step one – you can’t integrate an excel spreadsheet or an actual off-line system. So the first step before full-funnel attribution can be measured is to ensure you’re set up in a way that allows for this.

Who is this for?

There’s really only 1 main applicable case where this integration is truly required, lead generation businesses that pass web contacts to a sales process and pipeline. If you’re not already managing through a CRM, you should get one. The cost is now as little as FREE! HubSpot CRM is free, with some added bolt-on upgrades for all the bells and whistles, but the basic CRM is pretty robust and will suit any beginning team.

If you have a current solution that you’re using there are a few considerations – Is it a desktop solution or cloud based? Is it a provider solution (like SalesForce) or a custom created? As long as the system is connected to the internet and can be modified or connected via API’s and server calls, you’re able to tap into this – if not, consider adopting a more current solution as mentioned earlier.

Full Funnel Visibility and Attribution

Once the team is connected through a CRM system that is passing data to the analytical hub, defining triggers and value actions is next step. Connecting those key steps in the customer’s journey back to goals in analytics will allow for proper campaign optimization and attribution of the journey across all touch points.

Summary

If you generate leads on your website, it’s only a matter of time before this level of visibility will be a necessity, if it’s not already. Think about the evolution leading to today, can you imagine justifying your 50k / month ad spend around how many people viewed 1 page and left? Same is true today, how can we rest confidently on true actionable business insights when there’s no visibility into what happened with a contact form?

As CJM™ (Customer Journey Marketing) evolves, we understand the need for having a clear picture, accounting for all of the steps and devices across a customer’s journey from introduction to purchase.