Connecting direct and assisted conversions with CRM data provides invaluable insights into customer journey touchpoints and SaaS marketing channels’ performance. Namely, you can build channel and content performance conversion patterns and connect them with various stages of your sales cycle to see how web and mobile conversions add up to your sales.
Let’s review the best practices for using this approach for in-depth SaaS user journey analysis.
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A Direct Conversion typically happens when a user comes from an online source, for example, a paid ad, and immediately becomes a lead. The most common scenario will be a Request a Demo form filled out on a landing page used for Google Ads.
An Assisted Conversion will happen if a user used multiple channels to interact with your website before they actually converted into a lead. A typical example will look as follows: somebody discovered your website through paid advertising, then return through an organic source, and only then hit your website from the direct type-in to request a demo.
Analyzing direct conversions only can bring a lot of bias into your marketing decisions, as you will be missing out on longer chains and patterns of touchpoints leading to conversions. Adding assisted conversions into your metrics mix lets you understand the following metrics better:
Without going too deep into different attribution models woods, the main value of adding more information about lead sources to your SaaS CRM is channels’ performance data enrichment. By default, most CRM solutions will use their own way to assign an acquisition channel to a new contact or lead. However, most of the default CRMs settings tag a lead or a contact with just one Primary campaign. Thus, you are missing out on the multi-channel conversion paths completely!
Adding an extra layer of data from your web analytics systems can help you get more insights into channels’ performance and the value of direct and assisted conversions.
A good example of such integration will be to add Google Analytics data into your SaaS CRM so that you can connect each GA conversion with the later stages of your sales funnel. Then you will be able to attribute sales and revenue numbers to specific marketing channels and touchpoints in more detail.
In addition to default CRM marketing reports, you can build customized dashboards to analyze full life cycle paths. Such integration of Google Analytics and CRM data adds an extra layer to the default CRM ROI analysis and reports and lets you build more robust attribution models than out-of-the-box methods offered by most SaaS CRM systems.
With this level of integration, you can connect your paid ads, blog posts, keywords, and even individual ad copy to your sales data. Thus you will get the full visibility of which keywords and ads are actually driving your SQLs, and then sales.
FURTHER READING: Time-sensitive metrics in SaaS CRM
Liudmila is one of the best-in-class digital marketers and a data-driven, very hands-on agency owner. With top-level education and experience, Liudmila is a true expert when it comes to digital marketing strategies and execution.
