Marketing Stack
Expertise

Organizations must select a marketing stack to enable, fulfill, and optimize their efforts and there are two choices; fully integrated or best-of-breed for each layer of the stack.  Whatever your choice, we have the experience necessary to handle your unique requirements. 

Marketing Stack Expertise

• Google Analytics

We’ve worked with other analytics packages such as WebTrends, Adobe Omniture, and others, but Google Analytics has vast market share and is what we work with the most often.  The upcoming transition to Google Analytics v4 is something we are concentrating on to make sure that clients have a smooth transition.

• Google Tag Manager

Many firms use Google Tag Manager to easily deploy javascript tracking code (“tags”) like the GA tag or the Facebook tag, but many don’t bother to take it to the next level.  Tag Manager, since it is running actively on every page, can monitor actions, and trigger events to be sent to Google Analytics – for instance, a particular form being successfully sent or a button being clicked.  Our experts have handled numerous Google Tag Manager installations (recently, NINE separate websites for a very large health insurer…we handled all the Analytics and Event tracking from soup to nuts, including cross-domain tracking, engagement and action tracking, and PDF download and video play tracking). 

We have the technical expertise to make getting tracking right easy for you, and we strive to be just as easy for your web development team to work with.

• Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio was not-ready-for-primetime in our view for a long time; but recently the major issues arguing against its use were all addressed by Google with feature changes.  We now do almost all our reporting in Google Data studio, and can pull data from all the ad platforms we work with as well as Hubspot and Salesforce.  Turning reports into a sort of always-on-dashboard is our focus; once a slide is developed for a client, we have it forever, it automatically updates, and both we and the client can then see it whenever we want.  This is very powerful.

• Salesforce

In our experience, everybody either uses Salesforce, or they use Excel, that’s all!  So yes, we are very adept at navigating Salesforce’s reporting interface, and so forth.  Sometimes, HubSpot is used as a front-end to Salesforce and much of what we need can be pulled directly from there as well.

• Mailchimp

We’ve worked with lots of email platforms, and although we do not generally handle email campaigns for clients, we find it’s important to coordinate on tagging to make sure that Email is getting proper attribution when we analyze its results in Analytics.

• Marketo

We love marketing automation platforms and have worked with several.  We particularly like tagging special information in Ad URLs and then having the Landing Page pick that up and pass it along with the contact or lead, so we can “close the loop”.  Marketo, or others such as Pardot or Eloqua, are great for this.

• Pardot

Pardot is Salesforce’s marketing automation product; it was a separate product that they acquired.  It’s similar to Marketo in a lot of ways, and we’ve worked with it; it seems to be coming up more frequently, probably because Salesforce is becoming more adept at selling it alongside its flagship product now, and also because the marketing automation market is still growing at a high rate.

• WordPress

WordPress is ubiquitous; many of our clients use it, and we’re very comfortable and familiar with it.  We know how to optimize it from an SEO standpoint, know a lot of the right plugins you should consider, and are also very cognizant of staying on top of speed issues.

• HubSpot

Some of our clients are running HubSpot; our early opinion of it was that it was not really fully featured for a long time, which we found frustrating, but the last few years HubSpot has made massive improvements, particularly in the area of SEO.  So we have gone from being a little skeptical of HubSpot to being huge fans of it, and we’re deep into the ins and outs of its workings now, including reporting out on contacts, MQLs, and Closed Deals through Google Data Studio along with other platforms.

• CallRail

For businesses interested in lead generation or transacting with customers directly, phone tracking is essential.  CallRail allows you to create “number pools” of multiple phone numbers; then when a person does a search and clicks on an ad, they are temporarily assigned their own tracking number.  When they get to the website, CallRail automatically swaps in the temporary tracking number, so the visitor sees it, and if they call it, CallRail pings Google Analytics with a fake pageview that indicates the source was Google Ads, and even tells Google Analytics the keyword.  When that data is passed to Google Ads, it can make better decisions on the right keywords that work well.  It is an elegant system and an invaluable way of “closing the loop” beyond simple contact form submissions.