Social Media Metrics For Dummies

Integrating Metrics and CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and metrics — how can you integrate your analytics and your CRM effectively?

You can do so in two ways:

If you have a CRM program that is analytics friendly, you can use the fact that Google Analytics tracks data at the profile level to your advantage. Set up one user profile that will be added as a user to all client analytics accounts. This profile then has access to everyone’s analytics, and you can use Google Management API to drill down to the profile ID of each client and pull their data in to your CRM. You can find the Management API at this link:

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mgmt/ home.html

You can use the _utmz cookie to extract your visitor’s source data and include it in hidden form fields in your web forms. Using hidden form fields allows you to attach source data to the visible form fields that the user fills out, making your CRM data more complete. The _utmz cookie lets you attach hidden values like referral information (where the visitor came from), custom segment values, and number of visits to the standard form fields, such as user name and address.

You can use this code in your site in many ways (so many, in fact, that you could write an entire For Dummies book about utilizing cookies ...