Uncover the Moments that Lead to Conversion with Google Analytics & Acquia

Marketers work in a complex ecosystem consisting of multiple online and offline channels. On top of that, audiences don’t necessarily interact with brands in any single, clearly defined way. Given that, how do we enable our audiences, buyers, and customers to engage with our brand consistently without friction while staying out of their way? How do we make sure we are most effectively spending our marketing dollars in areas that will have the highest impact?

Optimize Your Spend

We at Bounteous believe that you can optimize spend by identifying the real moments that matter to your audience and coordinating messaging across those moments to create a strong, consistent brand promise. And while different personas have different moments that matter, it shouldn’t be left to guesswork; if you have the right data, you can uncover the insights to drive successful investments in your customers’ journeys. By combining qualitative analysis with a powerful combination such as Google Analytics and a digital experience platform like Acquia, you can deliver consistent messaging and personalized content based on segmentation and user insights.

Left Brain, Right Brain Thinking

Bringing together quantitative and qualitative data is critical; the most successful programs we’ve been involved with combine left brain and right brain thinking from the start. We perform quantitative analysis against existing data to learn about the true personas and behavior patterns of those engaging with your brand to help identify the moments that really matter. This takes the “gut” out of decision making and establishes the behavioral and attitudinal patterns of people interacting with your brand.

We recently performed user clustering analysis for an international luxury hotel chain to develop personas based on actual activity and affinity of interests. We then created a content-based attribution model to identify the two or three moments that were critical in the successful completion of each persona’s journey. These insights were powerful as we discovered personas the marketers weren’t aware of, and even more importantly we identified the key areas to invest in to drive results.

Based on this foundation, we focused our design expertise on the highest value moments for each persona. We verified those moments via additional user interviews, usability testing, and other techniques; this led to improved, finely tuned results-driven journeys. Once changes were implemented, we measured results, brought that back into our process, and further pushed “left brain/right brain” collaboration and experimentation.

Google Analytics and Acquia in Action

We make all of this happen by leveraging Acquia and Google Analytics 360 together to create a powerful marketing platform. Acquia provides the core DXP platform with enterprise-ready Drupal and global distribution. More specifically, Acquia has a set of interconnected products to help us achieve these objectives. Acquia Journey provides omnichannel orchestration, making it easy to drive consistent messaging and experiences regardless of how your audience wants to engage with you. Acquia Lift provides the ability to personalize content based on segmentation and user insights.

This marketing platform is built to be data-driven, so we integrate them with the Google Marketing Platform, starting with GA360 and BigQuery to execute deep quantitative analysis (such as content-based attribution) and then push the insights derived back into Acquia Lift and Journey to drive targeted, low-friction experiences that drive conversion and loyalty. GA360’s Audience integrations with other Google Marketing Platform tools like Display & Video 360 enable targeted advertising for those audiences, Tag Manager ensures consistent data collection across GA360 and Acquia, and Data Studio provides an end-to-end reporting view to monitor and evaluate personalization experiments and journey optimization.

The combination of Acquia and GA360 creates a digital marketing platform that allows you to use insights to quantify the importance of different touchpoints, to surface behavioral personas to target, and to conduct and measure experiments to determine how to best shape the moments that matter for different personas, all resulting in understanding how to best invest to drive success.

Bounteous recently presented on the topic of personalized engagement and journey orchestration at Acquia Engage 2018.  To learn more about aligning your digital marketing strategies across platforms and increasing conversions, check out the presentation here.