B2B Marketing Attribution, Made Simple: Connecting Business Intelligence & GA4 Insights

When it comes to reflecting on your data are you 100% confident in answering the following questions:

• What is your best attraction channel?
• What asset is converting the most?
• Which media channel is most efficient in resulting in customers?
• How much did you spend along the funnel and can you attribute each of your growth marketing efforts to the final sale?

More than likely you are not, but I’m sure you wish you had all the answers. On top of everything, you are probably also saying, “But how can I connect my data if the measurement platforms and metrics are constantly changing?” (that’s right, we are talking about Google Analytics).

You are not alone. These are the most common worries of marketing and business managers. But we can help you to understand how to connect your business intelligence (BI) analytics with the new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) in a way that you will know exactly what you are measuring, identify if what you are measuring is relevant for your decision-making process and finally, how it will play a role in creating the attribution model all digital marketers of the world are seeking.

First, Let’s Talk About the New Business Intelligence Challenges

Optimising your Business Intelligence (BI) - that is, your mode of collecting, analysing, and storing relevant marketing, sales and customer engagement data in one single source of truth - means connecting the dots in ways which allow you to make informed decisions and help build your business in lasting ways

Looking ahead at the next 5 years, it is a fact that AI-powered insights and Machine Learning (ML) are taking the lead on how to navigate the data-verse. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is significantly creating a deep impact on the BI landscape. Forecast and data prediction are even more accurate than ever. Anomaly detection and market fluctuation adaptative systems are making our lives easier when it comes to making decisions, but certainly not when integrating AI and ML into your own database. On the other hand, we have the Collaborative BI platforms, where a company can feed their own data with ultra-accurate, real-time inputs despite the geographic location. They also allow for different teams to collaborate, making their decisions and integrating results at the same time into the data flow. 

Unfortunately, BI trends feel utopic. The more sophisticated the platforms are, the more complicated the environment to integrate is and, most of all, to understand it. 

Do you want the accuracy of data predictions and the ease of a great data visualisation chart, skipping the complicated process of collecting, organising, categorising and framing variables into your dashboards? Let’s rub Alladin’s lamp to ask the Data-Verse Genie for our first wish. 

What About Google Analytics 4 (GA4)?

One of the main avenues through which any company obtains first-party data and gains insights into customer behaviour is their own website. Google Analytics plays a pivotal role as the central platform, unveiling the authentic customer experience. It delves into the intricate relationship between customers and the brand, unravelling the intentions and interests that drive customers to discover the website. This platform holds the key clues necessary to enhance their experience, pursue conversions, and foster brand loyalty. Indeed, it is not exaggerated to claim GA4 as one “must-go” platform and applaud Google for its efforts in giving us data-power.

GA4 is the new property of Google Analytics. Launched in 2022, it only took full control in July 2023. Google evolved the way in which the actions on a website were counted, from page-views to events-based. The new GA4 interface offers new crucial metrics based on use behaviours and predictive metrics.

GA4 Key Advancements

As you may have noticed, pure numbers are no longer the focus, it is customer engagement itself – what customers are actually doing, engaging with, and how many are being converted to longer-term prospects. This reimagines B2B marketing attribution – not just looking at what leads are coming in and from where but starting to build patterns of customer behaviour and interest to build a bigger picture. By using these new metrics to the fullest, you can broaden your data and analytics model across customer experience and into acquisition cost and lifetime value metrics at the top level, understanding engagement, channel, campaign, and team attribution. 

GA4’s user-centric, rather than number-centric, approach allows you to use the interface to make more connections between user behaviour and the needs and wants of the customer themselves. GA4’s system tracks the complete customer lifestyle, from acquisition, which focuses on web traffic, through to engagement, sales and retention – creating a customer journey which helps you identify demands and create the perfect demand generation strategy. This can enhance B2B growth strategies, so you can determine where the need lies, generate further demand, then work to meet it. By working out which sessions were engaged, which resulted in a conversion and which customers have been retained longer term, you can inform your BI strategy, considering customers’ long-term behaviours.

B2B marketing has its unique dynamic when it comes to demand generation

Certainly, B2B marketing presents a unique set of challenges. Unlike B2C, where a single customer might decide impulsively upon seeing an attractive pair of shoes online, B2B involves a more intricate dynamic. In the realm of B2B marketing, customer behaviour is a complex metric, shaped by the collective decisions of a team involved in the decision-making process. It’s not a solitary individual but rather a comprehensive team that collaborates to select the most suitable B2B product or service for their business needs. This team-based decision-making process underscores the importance of understanding and appealing to diverse perspectives and priorities within the B2B customer landscape. 

That’s why having a proper tool kit for data visualisation and attribution model creation becomes an urgent need to solve the equation and be able to answer the tricky question: where to find more high-value customers and how to bring them home? 

A strong growth marketing strategy will involve looking at patterns and trends over time. This is where GA4’s metrics, such as the Lifetime value, can assist you in taking your data analytics to the next level. Continually assessing user activity can help you determine what is helping you to keep your potential customers, and where they might be dropping off. Similarly, engagement sessions and engagement time are helpful metrics for ascertaining where users are interested in your content, which can help you piece together a clearer picture of their interests, needs and pain points to inform your overall business strategy and future content calendars. BI and GA4 can work well together – and when combined with an integrated data hub or CRM, the growth potential becomes even stronger. HubSpot can give you a hand in building your dreamed attribution model. HubSpot is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help you identify growth areas while analysing consumer search intent. From creating clusters and content curation to finding the right attraction territories, AI can help inform and boost your BI content strategies.

Boosting Business Growth with CRM Integration

Collecting and collating your data from Google Analytics 4, enhanced by other sources of data you may employ, such as social media, ad platforms, sales performance, industry trends, and others, can be optimised and streamlined if it is centralised and integrated into one single source of data. The multi-touch Attribution model (MTA) is becoming more common in B2B marketing due to the data coming in from multiple sources, so if these can be integrated into one source of information, it can make your job easier. 

Combining data from all the sources your prospects and customers are associated with can help you gain valuable insights. Boosting these with the right CRM platform can help you sketch out the perfect roadmap for the future of your business.

With all your data coming into one platform, you can identify cross-platform trends, making optimal use of the contact attribution and multi-touch revenue models to see where customers are engaging with your products or services, and with your content and website. A fully integrated platform makes it easier to join the dots, see which campaigns are engaging your customers and which require improvement, while remaining true to your brand intent.

With a streamlined system, data analytics and attribution can be more effectively used to help you understand where your market demands are, where they may be heading, and how you can create a roadmap for the future based on these trends. These sorts of informed decisions can help you identify growth areas in your marketing strategy and build sustainable growth of your business.

To rely on the data in your CRM and connected systems, you need to ensure you have the right data model and setup to leverage insights for informed business decisions, growth opportunity identification and capturing market share.

Download our playbook on How to Setup HubSpot for Full Funnel Visibility.

Is the Multi-Touch Attribution model (MTA) the future of Marketing? We don’t know, but it is a fact that your customers, those B2B team-based decision-makers, are not being touched by a single source, and definitely, not a unique time. Your customers (that group of people) need time to know you best, to get involved in how you can help their business and to gain confidence in picking the phone up or clicking on that button to request your services.

Unlike B2C marketing, B2B customers need time to understand your offerings, engage with how you can benefit their business, and build trust before taking action. This makes demand generation strategies for B2B a holy grail for those who, like us, enjoy the challenge of the B2B industry. Our recommendation is:

• Dive into performance analytics. GA4 is here for good. Embrace your data, and understand the sources, the customer journey, and the implications of each touchpoint.
• Integate technology as much as you can. Release your brand (and your team’s) from intricate data puzzles. Unlock data visualisation with platforms that help you to focus on what a machine can’t do for you: make decisions.
• Get the most out of your CRM. Let the platform take you far and beyond data. If you are with HubSpot, you’ll know when I say: make marketing-sales-operations sing together. If you are not, or you haven’t found the way it can be done, just drop us a message here. We are a HubSpot Partner Agency, specialising in digesting your data into decision-ready dashboards.