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Analytics & Web Tracking using Segment
Social Garden CEO and Co-Founder speaks to Bard Analytics Founder and Former VP of Customer Success at Segment, Jake Peterson about the huge opportunities within event tracking and analytics using Segment. Watch the full video below.
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Video Transcript
MICHAEL: Hi, my name’s Mike I’m the CEO at Social Garden. Today, we’re super lucky to have Jake here. We’ve actually brought him over as a consultant for Social Garden for this couple of days all the way from the U.S. Jake was the employee no.1 at a c
ompany called Segment, which is a very disruptive new entrance, into the analytics space. They’ve grown to be a huge business very quickly. So we’re very fortunate to have Jake here in our Go for Growth series talking a bit about analytics, what it means in the marketing space and how people can be using it. So, welcome Jake, thanks so much for coming. So, tell me, what do you think, everyone from the CEO to CMO right to the CTO, what should they thinking about in terms of analytics now?
JAKE: Yes. So, I can start with sort of traditional. So, traditionally analytics was sort of like what is going on in the page, how long people are staying there, stuff like that. And it’s really been siloed from the core financial data, your business model, how things are really running and profits and things like that. I think the next step in analytics, thanks to Segment and other tools on the market and Segment is able to collect that data in more detail and share it with different tools that have specific specialties to understand the data you’re using, what they’re doing on your site. And then what’s really important now I think is connecting the dots between financial data and that analytics data. So, you already have your financial monitor, profit things like that, now you’re seeing what people are doing in your site and you’re able to connect the dots, know who that individual user is, what ad they came from, what source they came from, maybe Google, things like that. And then follow them and see what they’re doing on your site, browsing your site, opting-in through the sales process and all the way to the closed deal. There’s a few different ways—types of data that Segment collects. So, the page data is sort of the traditional web analytics data. That’s where are they on your site. You’re actually be able to collect who are they as well, so where and who. And the last being like –
MICHAEL: So, “where” being like a literal sense, so are they in East Melbourne or wherever it might be.
JAKE: Yeah, that’s good distinction. So, actually the location of the person, their physical location but also what page there on. So, the homepage or browsing specific listing that kind of stuff that sort of already able—you’re able to do that in Google Analytics. The thing that Segment is on top of that is events, so clicking and opting-in and—
MICHAEL: Not a literal event. So it’s like someone clicking on a page or doing some kind of activity on the website and that’s what we refer to as an event in this instance.
JAKE: Yeah, exactly. And you can tell exactly where they were when they did that and where they’d been before that. The last piece is like who they are. So, as soon as they give you the email address then you’ll be able to connect the dots between all of their anonymous history before giving the email address and then whatever happens in the future through the sales process.
MICHAEL: Am I right in thinking that if you get your Segment pixel down on your website today, If you’re also thinking about what software to use whether Marketo or Pardot or Eloqua, you’re able to—once you do made a decision, you can plug in the Marketo tool, or Salesforce tool or whatever it might be into Segment and it retrospectively updates all of the behavioural data. Is that correct?
JAKE: Yes, there’s a few pieces to that. One is, so there’s different sort of plans on Segment. The enterprise plan, you’re able to—they store all of your data from day one and you can retrospectively add all of the data back.
MICHAEL: That’s incredibly important thing.
JAKE: Another interesting thing that Segment does is basically pull data down from different sources. So, your historical salesforce data you didn’t have to use Segment for the past year but it’s able to pull all that history down into Segment in what they call warehouse. So, now you have all your data from Salesforce in one place and you can query that and use different tools on top of that to visualise in a lot more flexible way than what Salesforce reporting allows you to do.
MICHAEL: Yes, and with that we can kind of find out who are the really high profit customer segments, because typically with any customer base, there are ones that are gonna be calling and needing additional customer service and all that kind of stuff, kind of eats the margin within the business. Where do you think, if we look at into the crystal ball in 10 years, what is the analytics landscape going to look like?
JAKE: I think in the specific type of data analytics and tying it together with your business model, we’re seeing a lot of tools that are very specific to different industries or different problems or different teams within the companies that we work with. So, for example there might be a specific tool that’s built for the real estate industry or for an education industry, and specific to the marketing team within that, the sales team within that. I’m sure you’ve seen different plugins for Salesforce, there’s little widget type tools. So it really sort of a buyers’ market for finding the right tool for the right job, to answer your questions, and basically boost profits and boost revenue.
MICHAEL: Cool. Well, thanks so much Jake. Awesome to have you on, man. I appreciate your wisdom.[/expand]
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