As a B2B SaaS startup founder I’ve struggled over the years with data tools that are not only easy to use but also reliable.
Many companies I know use a stack combo composed of tools like Segment, Google Analytics, Clearbrain, Adroll, etc. Ours was one of those companies, but it was not only complex to use, to setup and collaborate, but we also encountered many reliability problems.
In this blog post I want to dig into a specific case in our company. First of all, we launched three paid campaigns. One in Datagran, another in Adespresso and a third one directly in Google. All conversion campaigns that register an event every time a user signs up.
We have 4 ways to track those sign ups. The first one is with our back end, which sends us an alert via Slack. The second one is going directly into Google and Facebook MCC and BM. The third one is in Google Analytics by setting our conversion goals. And the fourth one is in Datagran’s platform through our custom funnels.
This is a Google Analytics screenshot showing our campaign acquisition. As shown here, it registers 4 new users for December 26th. According to Google Analytics two of those users came from a Google campaign called Broad and the other two from a campaign called Adespresso.
Now, according to our database we brought in 5 new users on December 26th. This was confirmed by going directly into the Facebook BM and Google MCC.
Facebook for example, shows that the Adespresso campaign only has 1 conversion.
Datagran’s campaign has 3. Not 0, as Google Analytics claim.
And Google’s campaign has 1 conversion. Not 2 as Google Analytics claims.
This analysis confirms that Google is providing erroneous results of our attribution. I am not saying that Google’s system is wrong. It could have happened that we set something wrong, and that’s where I want to make enfasis. In Datagran, we have a team of experts (data scientists, engineers, performance) that know how to do this stuff, and we are getting the wrong attribution. This confirms that connecting different systems and APIs is complex and leads to un-reliability.
The best system is the one that can track not only UTMs from platforms like Facebook and Google but that can also check actual consumer data in the back end to eliminate these problems.
That means that tools need to have a more holistic approach to guarantee a good quality in data, otherwise, decision makers will struggle in the era of data.
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