Are There Any Tools that Provide Full Funnel Analytics?

Full funnel analytics evaluates the business impact of all the activities put in place to convert and handle a customer. It integrates marketing, sales, customer service, operations, revenue, and finance for a complete look at how effective your strategies are.

This is in stark contrast to the isolated approach usually taken where funnels and activities are analyzed in relation to various sales or marketing goals. You might have a website funnel, lead magnet funnel, landing page funnel, user sign-up funnel, or purchasing funnel. Or your analytics may evaluate marketing, sales, and revenue on their own.

Narrow analytics is fine for breaking things down or evaluating different tactics. But you should always have deep insights into how well the entire funnel performs. This big picture intelligence is vital for accurate decision-making and determining what next steps to take.

What Does Full Funnel Analytics Encompass?

This concept represents a shift from considering funnels as separate user paths to looking at everything the business does to get a user from prospect to customer to repeat customer. Here’s what a healthy funnel should look like.

Awareness

The awareness stage involves catching prospects’ attention, attracting them to your site, drumming up interest, beginning to educate prospects, and generating engagement.

Awareness goals usually revolve around generating website traffic and clicks. This stage generally happens on social media channels, search engine ads, and your website.

Activities to track include:

• Inbound content marketing
• Visitor analytics
• Social media marketing
• Lead generation

Success in this stage depends on developing an initial understanding of who the buyer is and what their mental state is. As such, funnel analytics often concentrates on pinpointing which messages resonate with the market and what content will move them.

Related: Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices to Increase Your Revenue

Consideration

The consideration stage is all about making the case. Prospects understand more about their problem and why your offer is the right solution. This stage can go from educating a single prospect to arming them with all the information they need to win over other decision-makers.

Activities to track include:

• Website engagement
• Lead magnet conversion
• Email campaigns

This stage often sees the most concentrated activity, with heavy-duty marketing agency automation and segmented campaigns. Analytics tend to be separated by activity or application, such as email openings, email campaign performance, or online asset interactions.

Conversion

The conversion stage concentrates on getting prospects to make the buying decision and having that stick. Anything that converts a browser into a buyer is a conversion. This action might be a small impulse purchase, closing a long sales cycle in-person, making a B2B order, or making an online purchase.

Activities to track include:

• Sales and revenue
• Customer service
• Operations/fulfillment
• Post-sales email campaigns
• Social media activity

A full funnel’s conversion-related activities include everything that impacts the final buying decision and the operational side related to fulfilling it.

Retention

Post-sale activities aren’t always present in funnel analytics. However, given that it’s anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive to win a new customer than retain one, this should be on everyone’s agenda.

Retention involves reselling, upselling, winning customer loyalty, and converting customers into advocates.

Activities to track include:

• Sales and revenue
• Email campaigns
• Social media activity
• Website activity
• Operations
• Customer service

With everything that occurs across the entire funnel, how do you determine which activity was responsible for generating revenue or converting customers with the highest ROI?

For example, you might want to know what lead generation tactic brought in the highest-paying customers. Or determine what initial inbound marketing content leads to higher customer loyalty.

These are the insights full funnel analytics give you. It tracks each activity’s impact throughout the funnel to deliver a complete assessment.

Related: Defend Your Spend: How to Demonstrate Marketing Impact

What Funnel Analytic Resources Are Available?

There are several funnel analytics tools on the market. The problem is that most only address isolated funnel stages, and they can’t all integrate to provide full funnel analytics. As a result, most people either focus on one or two areas or cobble a few together. 

Let’s review a few options, then get into one that can provide you with the full picture.

Native Application Analytics

Virtually every tool has some level of analytics capabilities now. The core problem here is that they only tell you how that app is performing.

Some of today’s most robust analytical and AI capabilities are found within applications like HubSpot, Salesforce, or even Marketo. 

• Marketo’s marketing automation platform includes advanced business intelligence features.
• Salesforce is an overall solid sales and marketing B2B CRM platform. It’s an intelligent platform running with one of the most advanced AI systems.
• HubSpot provides analytics and dashboard visualizations related to content marketing campaigns and sales pipelines. Its strength lies in inbound marketing, and other funnel activities should be handled elsewhere.

These internal BI offerings are fantastic when you’re using the solution. However, they are closed proprietary systems that you can only use to analyze that tool’s performance. If you want to engage in full funnel analytics, the data in each solution needs to be removed and brought into other systems or platforms.

Spreadsheets

Some departments and startups still use spreadsheets for funnel tracking and analytics. Spreadsheets are affordable, replicable, quick to start, and easy to share.

Spreadsheets tracking gained more traction with Airtable’s release. Airtable is a popular option for tracking sales funnels and pipelines, product roadmaps, or marketing campaigns. It does a great job of moving teams from one task to another. The issue comes with turning any of this into usable analytics.

Spreadsheets work best as task managers, organizers, and work management planners. They can be integrated into data visualizers, but this leaves you with a static website performance representation.

And spreadsheets don’t account for inbound marketing, email campaigns, social media management, and search engine ads being managed with other applications.

H3: Business Intelligence Tools

Data visualization and funnel analytics solutions are powerful technical seo tools. However, these intelligence platforms can’t deliver a view of your entire funnel. Another potential challenge is how specialized the system is and whether or not your team is skilled enough to use it. These are legacy BI platforms and do not offer actionable, next-generation BI tools like leading companies in the industry do today.

Before using a business intelligence platform for funnel analytics, you first have to decide what is most important to visualize, what you’re willing to leave out, and if using such a solution will be feasible and efficient. 

Here’s what some of the top intelligence tools can deliver.

Microsoft Power BI can pull data from files or databases. Supported file formats include Excel, Power BI Desktop, standard CSV, XML tables, and text (.txt) files. It supports live connections with Microsoft Azure and other compatible databases. Data from different sources and tools may need to be extracted first to make it compatible with a Power BI import. Certain live connections only support one database, which leaves you the task of unifying your data first before you can visualize it.

Tableau can pull data from files, relational server databases, or servers. This capability makes it a little inflexible for anyone who wants a live app-based visualization. It gets a lot of attention for having a free, publicly available visualization generator, but many people find it can’t work with the data they use.

Domo uses pre-built integrators to connect cloud databases, on-premises systems, and other applications. It’s a much fresher take on business intelligence. However, Domo then leaves you to create custom scripts with SQL, R, or Python.

Google Data Studio has a few hundred connectors available for various cloud-based applications. It’s completely free, except for third-party connectors, which may charge a fee. So, what’s not to love? Like many free tools, Google Data Studio has a relatively limited reputation and has a somewhat steep learning curve.

How to Deploy Full Funnel Analytics

Moving customers across the entire funnel takes them from unaware prospects to satisfied, repeat customers. This takes a cohesive multi-department effort. Your funnel analytics should examine these efforts in their entirety.

A Top Choice for Full Funnel Analytics

When’s the last time you examined how well brand building, marketing, sales, and fulfillment worked together? Your analytics should give you a broad big picture view of this. However, most marketing, sales, and financial analysis platforms still target individual areas.

Full funnel analytics is only possible with a tool that automatically collects relevant data across all your systems. This step takes an entirely new approach.

Right now, there’s one solution on the market designed specifically for full funnel analytics. It’s an innovative, code-free tool called RevOptics.

RevOptics is an intelligent, answers engine. It integrates systems, transports data, and analyzes your funnel’s performance. You gain insight into the complete funnel along with predictive guidance and opportunity analytics. Ready to understand how funnel activities truly impact revenue and performance? Request a demo today.