“This is only half information. I want data about sales rep performance and store wise data too. A lot is missing here. Get me the complete info, can you?”
When the CEO of a retail company asked his web analytics team to get a combined analysis of online activities and sales, the team had only one option: contacting the data analysts to get Google Analytics data mashup with transactional data.
What is Google Analytics?
With the advent of web analytics, you can now quantify the acquisition, behavior, and conversion of customers in any marketing funnel. The tool that captures all these numbers on a website is Google Analytics. With this tool, the accuracy of measuring the online marketing funnel performance has improved multi-fold.
After Google acquired the web analytics firm Urchin in 2005, the tool has been rebranded as Google Analytics and henceforth saw reforms in the website designing and functioning for good.
Google Analytics tracks all the data from anonymous and, of course, named users using cookies and a small piece of embedded JS codes. The collected data include secured login details, device, and OS data, language, and traffic stats and finally, complete user activity. Every time a user hits any of the pages on the website, the JS code starts hovering to collect information.
This tool compiles data into the right categories after the collection, and then generates reports about users' interactions with the website.
What is Data Mashup?
Mashup is a major driving factor since the time modern-day analytics has crossed the moat of basic table structured reporting. Data fusion can be associated with merging two or more diverse data sets to get an enhanced and unified vision.
Some Examples of Data Mashup
The YouTube video popup that you often see on various websites is a data mashup of videos with the textual content to impart a better understanding and clarity to the content. Sometimes in a dashboard, an embedded map helps magnify the physical locations to see better insights of the events happening at that place with data drilled down to finer details.
Google Analytics Mashup Examples
When it comes to Google Analytics, you might want to connect the website analytics with another data system. The latter data set could be your transactional data sitting in the CRM system where all your information about customers dwell. You might want to connect your website analytics with the sales and marketing teams’ performance to interconnect data from both the domains. Or, you might want to connect your financial system with the web analytics to derive a correlation between the two.
What are the benefits of Data Mashup in Google Analytics?
Google Analytics statistics tell you about the interactions customers have with your product online. However, the massive pool of offline data sourced from store purchases, calls, face to face inquiries, etc., can be combined only through mashup.
Here are its prime benefits:
A Bird’s-Eye View for the Executives
Mixing up data from two different domains is not only smart but also lends dynamism and interactivity to analytics. This soothes the C-League members who are often enthusiastic about seeing data, reports, and numbers. By mixing data from various internal systems and web analytics, they can derive relationships among the departments that often collect facts but remain in fenced compartments.
Combining Transactional Data with Website Activities
Mashing up data analytics reports with Google Analytics is like generating a bird’s-eye view of the events happening online and offline.
For instance, a major global conference witnessed multiple prospects, and transactional data about them flooded the CRM. This must lead to a significant spike in the website hits and probably a decrease in cart abandonment. But CRM and website analytics are two separate departments siloed by a thin wall. As soon as one system crosses this wall, a joint analysis can be done.
Another example could be, a customer hits your website and places a call. Once the call is over, a deal finalizes in a week. So, the deal information is not available online but offline in CRM. Once Google Analytics interacts with the CRM, the two systems can together generate better insights on the transactions.
Once a correlation is established, the decision-makers can contemplate amending the strategies. How to bind a new lead and retain a customer would not be tricky questions to handle after a mashup.
Metering your Marketing Team’s Performance
Google Analytics mashup is extremely helpful when you are a marketing agency and deal with multiple clients. In such cases, you need to handle numerous websites for the clients. In case a single client maintains various websites, you can import data into one single interface and estimate the user activities. Such mashups come handy when you want to judge your human resource needs. Based on the hits, traffic, and overall website analytics, you can also plan to ramp up your headcount to handle the forthcoming demands.
How to create a Mashup?
Many widgets and tools are available in the market to perform a mashup. The native Google tools are also beneficial in mixing unrelated data sets. You can use Reporting API to get output from Google Analytics into Google sheets, Big Query, or Data Studio.
Big Query is a Google Developer tool that consolidates data from large data sets and churns insights. It can come handy when you want to analyze data from multiple websites. Data Studio is a full-fledged reporting and analytics system that connects all the Google marketing products like Google Analytics and Google AdSense, Google consumer products like Sheets and YouTube, databases like BigQuery and MySQL, flat files, and social media platforms. It enables a holistic approach to analytics on the mentioned Google products.
You can export data from your transactional systems like CRM or CMS into text files. These files can be imported into the Google Analytics Admin console. Once two data sets are joined, you can enhance ready-made reports in Google Analytics. The result is comprehensive and carries a better insight into what has happened with and behind the website.
Advanced BI tools like Power BI and Qlik can connect with Google Analytics. These tools can generate analytics from varieties of transactional systems. And the plus point is, you can create a connection from inside the tool using your Google account.
Conclusion
With modern analytics, the power of data lies in your hands. Imagine the drive mashup would produce when your online data are paved in through a simple data connector.
Transactional systems, when amalgamated with online analytics, generate those insights that can mobilize hidden patterns and bring them to the surface. By combining the two data worlds—transactional and web-based—your business can get an enormous lift with the right decisions.
We, at Logesys, are a team of experts in the field of analytics and various industries. If you want to partner with an analytics vendor, you have reached the right place. Please hit our contact page to connect with us or know more about our offerings.