Web Analytics – The Dominant Problem of Marketing Automation and Sales Funnel

Data and insights have long been considered valuable, even since the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte said, “War is 90% information,” in the 18th century. Three key events have recently stimulated interest in data and analysis: data capture, data storage and data processing. This is mainly reflected in web analytics. According to author Dodson (2016) in ‘The Art of Digital Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Creating Strategic, Targeted, and Measurable Online Campaigns’ certified by the Digital Marketing Institute (DMI), the innovative methodology of effective digital marketing is to start with the customer and work backwards. A campaign is only effective if it reflects the desires, needs, preferences and tastes of the consumer. At the heart of the structure is a 3-step process called the three 3i principles: initiation, iteration and integration. This simple idea translates into greater engagement, real customer interaction and multichannel campaigns that extend even to traditional marketing channels. So the third principle is ‘integrate’, which is important for digital marketing.

The principle works on three levels. The first is: integrate your efforts into digital channels. It is about integration between digital channels, using information collected through one channel to improve the effectiveness of another digital channel. The second is: integrate digital and traditional marketing activities. Digital integration and traditional marketing involves taking information gathered from digital marketing and integrating it into your traditional marketing strategy efforts. That is, data are made available in all channels to improve the effectiveness of all communication and marketing campaigns. The third is: integrate report sources. Companies that engage in digital marketing get the so-called abundance of data about their customers. However, it is important to collect data in some way that allows you to make good business decisions. Here, we can add the approach of Neher (2019) presenting the implementation of digital marketing strategy and the confirming approach of Simon (2021) where also dominates An Integrated Approach to Online Marketing. The next publications ‘Understanding Digital Marketing: A Complete Guide to Engaging Customers and Implementing Successful Digital Campaigns’ by Ryan and Jones (2021) provides a practical, no-nonsense guide to digital marketing, from strategy and digital transformation to best-practice basics and trends. Clear, informative and packed with case studies and examples, it gives an essential grounding in search engine optimisation (SEO), email marketing, social media, content marketing, performance marketing and much more.

Over the past 20 years, web analytics has evolved significantly from its simple beginnings to its final transition to the digital analytics. The Below graph show Figure 1 how web analytics has evolved.

Figure 1.

After rapid growth in the third phase that we see in the present times so the era of Internet 5.0 as a transition to digital analytics.

Web analytics has been accurately defined on a blog (https://www.ranktracker.com/pl/blog/marketing-automation-with-crm-effective-strategies/) as the use of software to automate various marketing activities. Marketing automation enables you to communicate with customers in a timely, precise and focussed manner. One application of automation technology is to guide leads through a sales funnel to conversion (Raczkowski, 2022)).

Web analytics focusses on understanding and analysing user behaviour for optimising marketing and decision-making processes. It revolves around the user’s journey, measuring and interpreting their actions on a website and doing so even prior to their visit. It encompasses various activities like user acquisition, behaviour analysis, conversion tracking, customer retention and remarketing. Web analytics involves a combination of tools, people, processes and culture, supporting the growth of online businesses. It caters to users at different stages of their interaction with a company, whether they discover it through search engines, engage via social media platforms, subscribe to mailing lists or have already visited the website. Maciorowski (2018) in ‘Trends in Digital Marketing’ discusses on the customer decision path more extensively. – The author also describes the main touchpoints that marketers identify and connect them into a logical purchase path. He also emphasises that in the era of multi or omnichannelling, it is highly difficult to integrate data from different channels.

Lovett (2009), Burby and Brown (2007), Kaushik (2009) and Deshpande (2023) highlight that web analytics is a rapidly growing industry impacted by the increasing demand for data-driven insights into the digital landscape. It involves the collection, measurement, analysis, and reporting of website and web application usage data. Web analytics enables organisations to understand user behaviour, optimise website performance, make data-driven decisions and drive business success. It encompasses onsite and off-site analytics, employing advanced tracking mechanisms, data visualisation and testing methodologies to derive actionable insights. The industry offers a wide range of tools, platforms, job opportunities and businesses, attracting investments and fostering innovation and competition. The impact of web analytics extends across various sectors, including e-commerce, media, finance, health care and online retail, where it plays a critical role in enhancing user experiences, increasing conversions and achieving specific business goals. The future of web analytics holds immense potential, with advancements in technology, integration with emerging technologies and the increasing focus on data privacy and regulations shaping its evolution and contribution to the digital economy.

According to Feoktistov (2022), web analytics is a complex process, consisting of many aspects. It applies not only to websites, but also to social media, applications and other media that are available on the internet. The goal of web analytics is to better manage a specific product by collecting and processing valuable data about users, sessions, community behaviour and many other aspects. In addition, it is intended to allow the improvement of a specific product (e.g. website, application or social media profile). An important goal of web analytics is to also optimise the conversion rate. Further, the author lists the next steps. Web analytics allows you to track user activity on the website and, in this way, you can optimise your content marketing strategy. Key performance indicators (KPIs) should be measured and monitored regularly. Owing to the KPIs, you can also check the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, improve the quality of online services and create customer profiles to increase the profitability of advertising and sales activities. They help track organic and paid traffic in real time. Owing to analytics, you can also notice problems on the website. For example, preparing an incorrect sales funnel, which can generate less profit.

Here, you can present the classification given by the yetiz.pl activities regarding MA for B2B, for e-commerce, in B2C services./In Marketing Automation for B2B./Sales in the B2B model are mainly based on building relationships. With the help of the MA tool, you can define the path of transparent communication, owing to which the brand image will be strengthened and the assumed business goals achieved.

Marketing automation in e-commerce. Solutions for e-commerce can be focussed mainly on scenarios that are designed to stimulate customers to make purchases. These include, for example, the abandoned cart scenario, retention (returning the customer to the store after a long absence), decision-making based on RFM analysis (How much time since the last purchase? How often does the customer shop? For what amount?), loyalty to the customer (e.g. loyalty programme service), cross- and upselling scenarios (upselling of products) and many others.

Marketing automation in B2C services. Most often, MA activities are based on educating customers about the offer and lead to nurturing scenarios, due to which a potential customer can go through all the stages of the sales funnel. - According to Błażewicz (2021), the most important functions are:

identification of anonymous persons, 360–degree profiles and monitoring of anonymous contacts,

For the purposes of the examples described below, three layers are distinguished in the dashboard: inbound marketing, outbound marketing and e-commerce. No business should rely solely on one source of traffic, as there are advantages and disadvantages. Królewski and Sala (2013) have previously signalled these activities. Below, the goals of data-driven marketing according to Kotler (2021) are given Figure 2.

Figure 2.

In terms of tracking appropriate KPIs on their dashboards, marketers should prioritise the traffic sources their acquisition models utilise. These sources include, but are not limited to following:

Inbound marketing: SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, PR, and newsletter.

Outbound marketing: Paid ads (search engine and social media), email marketing, and targeting.

Online marketers should implement the most-important KPIs on their dashboards. They should track KPIs on a regular basis because doing so allows them to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. By tracking KPIs, marketers can see which aspects of their marketing strategy are working well and which may need to be improved. This can help them to make more informed decisions about their marketing strategy and allocate their resources more effectively. Additionally, tracking KPIs on a regular basis can help marketers to identify trends and patterns in their marketing data, which can provide valuable insights into the behaviour of their target audience. This can help them to tailor their marketing efforts more effectively and improve the overall success of their marketing campaigns. Inbound marketing has its advantages: higher credibility, higher LTV and higher conversion rates. However, the disadvantages are difficulty to scale and consumption and resources. Outbound marketing has its advantages such as instant results, easier scaling and increased visibility. The disadvantages include growing expenses, traffic becoming more expensive, lower LTV and lower conversion rates. However, the goals set in data-driven marketing are mentioned below:

Inbound marketing: clicks, views, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), average position, conversions, bonus rate and best converting subpages.

An important study is the published chapter by Wiktor (2018): ‘Architecture of the Virtual Communication System – Conditions and Challenges’ where the author presents indicators of the effectiveness of online advertising. Thus, these are the listed metrics used in monitoring and evaluating the communication effects of online campaigns, as well as metrics that make it possible to assess the effective results of online advertising. In addition, an interesting study is the Mazurek-Łopacińska’s (2018) article, ‘Marketing Research their New Paradigms and Methods in the Digital Economy’. The author draws attention to the role of management cockpits in the above-mentioned research and facilitates personalisation of content by presenting data in specific sections directed to a specific user (personalised). On the other hand, the use of visualised presentations of data in dashboards facilitates communication and collaboration in marketing management and the very important formation of the company’s relationship with the customers (collaborative).

The specific KPIs that marketers should track on a daily, weekly or monthly basis will depend on their business goals and the specific metrics that are relevant to their marketing efforts. However, some common KPIs that marketers may want to track on a daily basis include website traffic, email open rates and social media engagement. Weekly KPIs could include lead generation, sales conversions and customer satisfaction. Monthly KPIs could include overall revenue, customer lifetime value and return on investment. Ultimately, the most important thing is for marketers to identify the KPIs that are most relevant to their business goals and track them on a regular basis to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

When creating dashboards, marketers should track the KPIs that correspond to their marketing efforts and activities. For different campaigns, KPIs can be slightly different; however, that are some metrics that marketers should track in their dashboards whatever their current campaigns are focussed on currently.

Monitoring your website’s organic traffic is important because it can give you valuable insights into the effectiveness of your website’s content and SEO and inbound marketing strategy. By keeping track of your organic traffic, you can see how well your website is performing in terms of attracting visitors from search engines like Google. This information can help you identify areas with room for improvement and also help make changes to your website to increase its visibility and attract more organic traffic. Additionally, monitoring your organic traffic can help you identify trends and changes in your website’s traffic, which can be useful for planning and making future decisions about your website’s inbound marketing content and SEO strategy.

Monitoring your paid ads’ clicks, impressions, CTR and CPC is important because it can give you valuable insights into the effectiveness of your paid advertising campaigns. By keeping track of these metrics, you can see how well your ads are performing in terms of attracting clicks, generating impressions and driving traffic to your website. This information can help you identify areas in need of improvement and also make changes to your ads to increase their effectiveness and get more value from your advertising spend. Additionally, monitoring your paid ads’ clicks, impressions, CTR and CPC can help you identify trends and changes in your ads’ performance, which can be useful for planning and making future decisions about your paid advertising strategy.

Key metrics to monitor in an ecommerce shop include revenue, average order value, conversion rate and customer lifetime value. Revenue indicates the total income generated by your shop, reflecting its performance in generating sales. Average order value represents the average amount spent by each customer, indicating how well your shop encourages higher spending. Conversion rate reflects the percentage of visitors who make a purchase, showing your shop’s ability to convert visitors into customers. Customer lifetime value measures the total amount a customer is likely to spend over their relationship with your business, highlighting customer retention and engagement.

This study will include a literature review and case study analysis, an example of a dashboard including marketing automation and sales funnel analytics. In fact, a research case study gives powerful insight into many important aspects of deepened web analytics. This presentation of the case study gives the benefit of convincing one of the importance of the studied phenomenon because quick effects are achieved in the development of the company.

In current conditions, the marketer resembles a doctor in the emergency room. Now, during the post-COVID time, the resemblance is even more as all models of business and aspects of life have moved to online platforms. This MA relieves the marketer from many tasks. It is a ‘robot’ that supports and replaces the marketer. The analytical cockpit or dashboard enables to monitor and analyse the results in real time. It can be noted that most publications on digital marketing present many case studies. For example, Pain (2019) in ‘Marketing Automation and Online Marketing’ and Hanlon (2022) in ‘Digital Marketing Strategic planning & Integration’ supported their publications with case examples from 28 global companies and brands.

According to Chaffey (2022), digital marketing provides the most comprehensive guide to all aspects of using the internet, digital media and marketing technology to achieve the goals of integrated multichannel marketing. This streamlined seventh edition provides comprehensive, practical guidance on how companies can get the most out of digital media and technology to meet their marketing goals. Digital marketing links marketing theory with practical business experience through case studies from cutting-edge companies such as ASOS, Spotify, Zalando and Zappos to help students understand digital marketing in the real world.

The description of the sample case study on VRG Bytom presents the general form of MA’s activities. BYTOM is a Polish clothing brand whose history dates back to 1945. It successfully combines tradition and the latest trends. It is best known for stylish men’s suits-perfectly cut and sewn in Poland from the best Italian fabrics. The brand’s collections refer to culture and art. Its ambassadors are well-known actors, artists and musicians. BYTOM conducts stationary sales, as in showrooms located primarily in large commercial and service facilities, and online, in the e-store bytom.com.pl.

The scope of activities include:

Google Ads campaigns (Search Network-Sponsored Links, DSA-Digital Servies Act, RLSA, Display Network, Shopping campaigns, Dynamic Remarketing, Discovery, Gmail and YouTube).

Objectives of cooperation

Achieving maximum effectiveness of Google Ads and Facebook Ads advertising tools to achieve sales plans (within a specific advertising budget).

Automatic marketing is increasingly used in analytical processes and in the creation of tools to measure the effectiveness of activities related to inbound and outbound marketing. Taking into account the timeconsuming nature of creating reports and the involvement of various departments in the preparation of such materials, more and more often we can meet with automatic solutions that are implemented by the integration of several analytical tools. The most common tool used by marketers or analysts is Google Analytics, from which we can get key information about traffic from all channels we have in the organisation, i.e. paid, organic, direct and social media traffic. Most often, marketing departments run many campaigns at the same time; therefore, analysts must approach the subject very meticulously and show all information about a specific source on a correlated report, but let us start from the beginning. The very process of creating online campaigns, in order to be properly measurable, must be appropriately tagged. This process includes setting marketing campaigns, starting from the selection of keywords, content and main campaign assumptions, and ending with setting events that will allow us to measure the final effects of the campaign, i.e. the number of leads or conversions from a given advertisement. This last stage is associated with enabling the final steps of the campaign to measure its effects and visualise data on the dashboard. To set campaign goals and events, we mainly use a tool such as Google Tag Manager, which we must enlist in Google Analytics so that the data is visible in the report.

Each advertising campaign conducted on the internet must have a destination, where conversions will be finalised. This is possible thru to links that direct from the ad to the placement. Most often, it is the advertiser’s website, store or application. In order for the data to be displayed correctly in the report, we need to accurately describe each link by giving it parameters. Such links are called unified threat management (UTM). We describe them by combinations: URL link, UTM source, UTM medium, UTM campaign, UTM content, and UTM term. The finished UTM then tells us about the specific content of the URL link and where exactly it comes from. That procedure enables us to easily separate unnecessary traffic and extract specific information about the traffic, advertisement or campaign we are interested in.

Taking into the consideration the companies from the B2B sector, they uses tools such as Google Data Studio to create an individual dashboard that we can run at any time, select a date range and quickly get information about our traffic. Below is an example of such a dashboard.

Such a dashboard presents:

Basic data about total traffic

Due to the use of such tools, we can launch a dashboard at any time and verify the results of our advertising campaigns without the need to involve other people, including marketers or analysts. The key advantage of such automatic dashboards is primarily the ability to filter data by dates, specific traffic parameters and have data compiled in a legible ‘just in time’ way.

Each dashboard is created for the specific needs of a given organisation; hence, it is worth mentioning that the parameters can be easily adjusted in the Google Data Studio panel, which integrates data with our Google Analytics. This gives us the opportunity to expand such a report and personalise it for the selected organisation or department. Increasingly, companies decide on such solutions, because it is a very intuitive solution that saves time in the preparation of extensive reports on the many activities a given company conducts.

This particular dashboard in picture 3 presents an annual view of the traffic generated by various sources and resources of an IT company. The dashboard is also coupled with the sales funnel described in Figure 4. The data show that the company generated over 61,000 sessions and almost 185,000 page views for a year, where the average time on the page was about 45 s. The average bounce rate decreased to 41.5%, which means that compared to the previous year, the company adds more engaging content and better manages the information structure in terms of UX. The company gets the most traffic from the direct channel, and users most often enter it from stationary devices. The company reaches the most users in Polish and the United States aged 25–44. This is key information for analysts to better target future advertising campaigns.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

The next step is the analytical cockpit or dashboard in Figure 4 that enables to monitor and analyse the results sales pipeline in real time. The sales pipeline is an illustration of the theoretical path that the internet user goes through from the moment he enters the website to the moment he becomes a customer. A sales pipeline is a multi-stage sales process, in which there are fewer potential buyers at each of the subsequent sales stages. For this reason, a standard, healthy graph of the number of customers or sales value at each stage is smaller and smaller and arranged in the shape of a pipeline. The goal of using a pipeline is simple: to increase sales efficiency.

In Figure 4, we can see a practical example of the use of a sales funnel, which summarises the activities of an advertising campaign regarding the sale of a B2B company’s product. The sales funnel was constructed on the basis of the AIDA model, i.e. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Each stage of the sales funnel corresponds to the segment that is in a given stage of the consumer (company) path. The sales funnel usually consists of four stages; however, we can extend it by any number of selected indicators. In a specific example, we can observe parameters such as: ad impressions, clicks on the ad, number of users, micro-conversions and the number of leads. The entire data set is compared to the previous period, and the differences with this period have been calculated. Due to the correlation function between excel sheets, it is possible to automate the data shown on the funnel. Increasingly, we can meet with the concept of nesting.xml functions, which, due to mutual search between sheets, are able to refresh data after entering them into specific fields specified by functions. The sales funnel contains comprehensive information about the sale of applications. of one of the IT companies on a monthly basis. We can conclude that using a budget of about PLN 34,000, the company’s advertising was displayed 101,000 times, which turned into almost 14,000 clicks into advertising. This is the Attention, Interest stage in the AIDA model. Moving on to the next stages of the funnel, almost 12,000 people performed 9,000 microconversions set as a click on the ‘Let’s talk’ button on one pager, which resulted in 327 leads. This is a summary of the second stage of the AIDA model, i.e. Desire, Action. We can observe a high CTR indicator, which indicates a well-targeted campaign and high CR lead and microconversions. The whole funnel is also related to the previous month, where we can examine the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and product sales.

Owing to marketing automation, we can achieve above all time savings and a constantly repeatable process, which after verification can be constantly used, for example, to illustrate marketing data on the dashboard. We can easily eliminate the human factor in the form of errors in rewriting data from other tools or a simple confusion of indicators. Automation is – between each other a huge advantage for an intuitive and transparent way to systematically display statistical data in marketing and more. By using automation and combining it with key digital marketing tools, we can expect an increase in sales and a better understanding of our potential customer, because we are able to better assess the behaviour of the digital user and better adapt the parameters of the campaign to his needs and be able to acquire more business contacts. The increase in sales is possible mainly due to an in-depth analysis of traffic and our final consumer, which is why it is so important to properly show the data, whether in the form of a dashboard or a sales funnel. Currently, marketing does not exist without analytics. To be able to create good advertising campaigns that are focussed on sales and customer acquisition (lead generation), you need analytics, which nowadays is always associated with automation.

How does the use of marketing automation support the impact on customers and the market participants? Both inbound and outbound marketing affects customers and market participants. In addition, these activities, in correlation with appropriate management and monitoring, i.e. precise web analytics and data visualisation, make it possible for companies to better draw conclusions from their activities on the internet, and above all, they can easily optimise these activities due to indepth analytics and thus increase sales. In addition, web analytics shows the customer’s journey, i.e. the user’s path. In addition, marketing and sales activities are also visible in the sales funnel itself, i.e. in its first stages, relationships with customers are built, and, in the further stages, customer relations are managed, because close relationships are established and the distance between the customer and the company is shortened.

This article provides comprehensive, practical guidance on how companies can make the most of web analytics and marketing dashboards. Marketing automation combines marketing theory with practical business experience through case studies. Here, a case concerning Bytom and an indepth case concerning an anonymous company were presented.

This text can be used for all students as it contains the details they need at the academic level. Importantly, it is also important for practitioners because it shows what marketing automation is, and it can also encourage small- and medium-sized enterprises to use this technology for survival and competitive advantage. In addition, it is designed for professionals and marketers who want a good understanding of the basic concepts of marketing automation. Specifically, it is for marketers who want to implement MA best practices and supplement their digital knowledge. Also, managers who need a solid understanding of how to strategically use these features, MA-digital technology, to grow their business can benefit. In addition, it is helpful for agencies that want to provide their clients with lasting value through a comprehensive approach to digital technologies.