Competitive Analysis With SEMRush and Summit Community Bank

  Summit Community Bank is a nearly $4 billion regional community bank. It provides banking, lending, and trust and wealth management services at 44 banking locations across three states. While primarily focused on maintaining its strong footprint in legacy locations, Summit Community Bank has used a successful merger and acquisition strategy to encourage steady growth over the last six years. As it continues to grow in new markets, new opportunities bring new, diverse challenges, including exploring new peers and competitors, expanding brand awareness, and capturing market share. In the digital landscape, competitive analysis is especially important when it comes to optimizing one of an organization’s most valuable online resources, its website.  Competitive analysis, as SEMrush notes, can help benchmark a business’ current SEO performance, identify areas of improvement in SEO strategy, reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses, and discover competitors' winning strategies (Sl...
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Tools to Complement Google Analytics For B2B Businesses

 Google Analytics is a robust platform that allows companies, large and small, to draw insights and data on their customers from which to better optimize marketing at no cost. From goals, to reports, to segmenting, to Google Search Console and Google Trends, the Google platform is nimble and fairly comprehensive- a great value for ROI when a company isn’t spending anything for these insights! However, Google Analytics has its drawbacks, which competitors have recognized and turned into competitive alternatives to Google Analytics. Some alternatives can replace Google Analytics altogether, while others provide a useful complement to Google Analytics reporting.

This blog post will investigate some of the drawbacks to Google Analytics and take a look at a platform that can help complement Google Analytics to round out a full digital portfolio that will help inform and inspire more efficient action.

Drawbacks to Google Analytics

As Tietbohl (2022) states “the reality is that all analytics tools have variations and discrepancies and it is often a matter of deciding what you can live with and what you are able to adjust to.” Google Analytics is no different. Oftentimes data isn’t completely accurate which can harm decision-making if done without digging into why data is off (Zheng, 2018). Sometimes even the issues that you can fix within the platform take time, effort, and knowledge.

For example, did you know you can better understand direct traffic or filter out referral spam by segmenting “dark traffic” and filtering pages and changing the conditions tab (Zheng, 2018)? Or that you can better track campaigns and visitors by using the Google Campaign URL Builder to add trackable UTM to your campaigns (Zheng, 2018)?

However, there are also a number of drawbacks that can’t be changed within Google Analytics.

Cookies are a big topic this year as the world looks towards a cookie-less future. As Zheng (2018) states, “cookies are important because Analytics can use them to tag a visitor, then aggregate that visitor’s behavior over the course of multiple visits.” However, a user can opt-out of cookies altogether, which can skew information. Even if they don’t opt-out, sometimes a firewall may automatically block cookies or cookies are deleted from browsing history, triggering a visit tagged as a new visit (Zheng, 2018). Cookies may also timeout which can complicate reporting on the duration of visits or time on page goals (Zheng, 2018).

Google Analytics is also not generally advanced enough to track across multiple devices. This means that a person may be influenced to make a purchase while seeing an ad on one channel but then using a different device to actually purchase, but Google Analytics won’t record the switch and the conversion will be attributed as a new visit (Zheng, 2018).

B2B vs B2C: Does it Matter For Analytics Platforms?

Analytics is an important part of marketing operations regardless of the industry. However, features and reports with Google Analytics may be used in different ways for a Business to Business (B2B) focused company than for a typical Business to Consumer (B2C) focused company.

Anidi (2021) emphasizes that some of the major differences is that “the consumer end purchasing typically involves one individual while the B2B consists of a group of people to make a buying decision. As a result, the individual purchases in B2C translate typically to a shorter sale cycle while B2B involves a longer one.” Acquisition types, referrals, and conversions such as downloads and contact forms are important for both, here. But because B2B places emphasis on Account Based Marketing (ABM) many times, the analytics may be more focused around individual data points and the correlation of marketing efforts to revenue unlike B2C that needs to track purchases and funnel reports from product views down to purchase conversion (Anidi, 2021).

ZoomInfo (2021) reports that in 2018 “90% of B2B customers reported investigating between two and seven sites before they made a purchase. Further digitization of the buyer's journey, along with the pandemic's impact on field sales and marketing tactics, has only accelerated this trend. However, the rub here is simple: All web traffic is NOT created equal.” It is much easier for a company to throw money at retargeting efforts or big marketing spends when they are too broad and reaching too many people that aren’t decision-makers for a business. The ability to drill down and really accurately target and track is where the sweet spot is for B2B.

So, are there analytics platforms, or a pairing of platforms, that allow more high-value insights to drive better conversion reporting and ROI?

ZoomInfo and Google Analytics: Complementing Conversions

Now knowing that B2B companies need better insight into their ideal consumer profile, the groups of decision-makers identified within those profiles, and data that favors ABM, the ZoomInfo tool can be used to complement much of the Google Analytics offerings.


Figure 1.  Chart showing the top reasons for needing better data enrichment solutions. By ZoomInfo. (2021).

ZoomInfo is a subscription-based data intelligence platform that provides precise data on companies, industries and decision-makers (ZoomInfo, 2022). Through the use of the main ZoomInfo platform, WebSights, Intent, and Engage, the tools complement the aggregate data from Google Analytics in a more trackable and actionable fashion while making data predictive and personalized (ZoomInfo, 2022).

ZoomIntent compliments the Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends, tools that belong in the Google Analytics suite to help monitor search keywords and direct strategy back to your website and search results ranking (Google, 2022). ZoomIntent works similarly but adds in another layer of prediction, using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and rank keyword searches and the likelihood of needing to convert on those searches, while also identifying the company and industry in one easy to use dashboard (Think Big Analytics, n.d.). Using Google Trends and Keyword Planner you can find the keywords that generate high volume of search for the key areas your company focuses on as well as which keywords your competitors are paying to boost and then use those to place as the intent signals within ZoomIntent. Then every Monday you receive a report on the companies that searched for those keywords/categories as well as a rating for how close they are to taking action. From there, you can segment the report to only show those leads closest to convert or filter by ideal customer persona. Then marketing and sales outreach strategies can begin with personalization.

WebSights hooks into the company’s website to analyze visitors and track across website pages, much like Google Analytics (ZoomInfo, 2022). However, WebSights quickly and easily allows you to attribute pages visited to specific companies and drill down right from that view into decision-makers contact information and integrate it into CRM’s (ZoomInfo, 2022). This feature is best used when pairing with Google Analytics and Google Ads for the best retargeting strategy.

ZoomInfo (2021) states that “once you have WebSights integrated with Google Analytics, you can create an audience segment with specific company attributes that fit your ideal customer profile in addition to the other filters Google Analytics offers, like webpage consumption and source of the traffic. Next, you can export this audience to Google Ads to run your retargeting campaign.” Basically, together this makes segmenting, personalization, and attribution even more powerful.

As a customer review from Johnson (n.d.) states “ZoomInfo is great for companies that are both [industries] agnostic and specific. I've used it at both types of companies. For [marketing], it really lets you scale your efforts to those who are more likely to make a decision, especially if you have Insights, as opposed to just picking a list of companies that may not be in the market for your services, and spending lots of ad dollars to get their attention.”

 Conclusion

This blog recommends one complimentary platform to Google Analytics. It is also a bit more specific to the nuances of B2B over B2C. However, there are also many high-powered alternative options. Here are a few others in the marketplace:      

  1. SEM Rush,
  2. Adobe Analytics
  3. MixPanel
  4. Matomo (G2, 2022).

Choose an option that makes the most sense for your business and reporting needs while also keeping budget in mind.

 

References

Anidi, P. (2021, February 12). Top 10 website analytics tools. Do B2B businesses and B2C businesses need the same tools? Salespanel Blog. Retrieved from https://salespanel.io/blog/marketing/website-analytics-tools/

Google. (2022). Use Keyword Planner. GoogleAds Help. Retrieved from https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7337243?hl=en

G2. (2022). Google Analytics alternatives. G2 Digital Analytics Software. Retrieved from https://www.g2.com/products/google-analytics/competitors/alternatives

Johnson, A. (n.d.). Google Analytics vs ZoomInfo. TrustRadius. Retrieved January 31, 2022 from https://www.trustradius.com/compare-products/google-analytics-vs-zoominfo

Tietbohl, M. (2022, January). Week 3 lesson: exploring Google Analytics view setting and advanced features. Ecampus. Retrieved from West Virginia University, IMC 642.

Think Big Analytics. (2022). ZoomInfo features and reviews. Think Big Analytics. Retrieved from https://thinkbiganalytics.com/zoominfo

ZoomInfo. (n.d.). Our Data. ZoomInfo. Retrieved January 31, 2022 from https://www.zoominfo.com/our-data

ZoomInfo. (2021, May 9). How ZoomInfo WebSights improves retargeting strategies. The Pipeline. Retrieved from https://pipeline.zoominfo.com/marketing/websights-retargeting-strategy

Zheng, D. (2018, March 23). Why is google analytics inaccurate? The Daily Egg. Retrieved from https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/why-is-google-analytics-inaccurate/



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