Web Analytics in Dynamics CRM 2011, Part 1

I’ve been using CoreMotives for Email Marketing, integrated within Dynamics CRM, for some time now. I’d tried just about every different approach for Email Marketing before switching to CoreMotives, and the fact that I’m still a happy customer after nearly a year of experience is a good sign! I’ve written a couple of articles on that topic, and before too long I’ll write another one about some of the great new features in the new version.

When I first started using it, the Email Marketing was all I really cared about. But in this article I’ll discuss its Web Analytics features. The longer I’ve used CoreMotives the more I’ve come to appreciate the advantages of their implementation of web analytics, and in particular how it’s integrated within Dynamics CRM 2011.

Why Integrate Web Analytics in Dynamics CRM Anyway?

Good question, and one I get a lot. After all, Google Analytics does a great job with analytics, and it’s hard to imagine that some little CRM add-on might be a compelling alternative. To frame the discussion, the following figure will give you a good idea of how CoreMotives integrates web analytics within Dynamics CRM 2011:

The four record types – “entities” in CRM-speak – in the Web Intelligence section on the site map are the ones added to your Dynamics CRM when you provision CoreMotives. You can see in the figure I’ve selected the Web Page record type, have selected the Active Web Page view, and I’ve expanded the chart pane to display a custom chart I created. This does a good job of illustrating the Big Advantage #1 of having web analytics inside Dynamics CRM:

• You can use familiar Dynamics CRM tools – like the Report Wizard, or in this example, the Chart Designer – to customize the experience. That “Top Ten Pages” chart is a custom one I created, and while it’s not exactly exotic, you can create any custom chart or report you need. This may be possible in Google, but I don’t know how to do it, so I can avoid learning yet another report writing technique and leverage the skills I’ve already got.

Big Advantage #2 is implicit in the figure, so I’ll draw it out a little more explicitly:

• The CoreMotives web analytics record types are good old fashioned customizable Dynamics CRM entities, which means you can … well… customize them! I’ve customized the Web Page entity slightly, adding the Site column and customizing the values in the Category column. Obviously these are small customizations, but you can customize and extend them as much as you need to. A huge advantage of this is that it lets you create views, reports and charts that don’t require any particular analytics expertise, ones that actual business people can understand.

Big Advantage #3 is arguably the most important, and gives you something Google doesn’t:

• Once you start integrating CoreMotives web analytics with Email Marketing, you get non-anonymous tracking and analytics. That is, the individual web sessions and web page views (you can see those record types in the figure above) can be tied directly to a contact or lead in your Dynamics CRM database. Treating responses to campaign emails and interactions with your web content as “regular” Dynamics CRM activities, and associating them directly with a contact record, those are huge advantages of integrating email marketing and web analytics right inside CRM.

Mini Case Study: Even Add-ons are better in Dynamics CRM 2011

This mini case study is partly about web analytics with CoreMotives inside Dynamics CRM, and it’s partly about how the new features in Dynamics CRM 2011 enhance the value of add-ons as well as the core user experience. First, a little background on how these web analytics work and how I use them:

Once you’re provisioned with CoreMotives, they email you a little JavaScript snippet of tracking code you can add to any page you want to track. I’m concerned with analytics for this (WordPress) blog, so I can add it to the footer.php file and get tracking for every page. My company (Magenium) just moved to Dynamics CRM Online. I completed migrating our data on Wednesday morning, and got CoreMotives up and running Wednesday night.

I get a fair amount of visitors on the Trick Bag from outside the U.S., and I wanted to visualize the data better, so I created a few charts and dashboards so we can see where visitors are coming from.

I’m writing this at 8:00 AM, Friday Jan. 28, and here’s what my Dynamics CRM 2011 Web Traffic Trends dashboard looks like:

These are all the same chart, but they’re applied to different underlying views. The chart on the left shows Page Views by Country for today only. Here’s a bigger version of it:

The chart in the middle is based on the “Last 7 Days” view. (Since I just got CoreMotives provisioned yesterday, all that means is that it includes two days’ worth of data rather than just the 8 hours so far today the first one includes.) Here’s what the Page Views by Country Last 7 Days chart looks like

I suppose it should have been obvious that people in India, Asia and Europe are actively doing things like reading blog articles about Dynamics CRM when we’re sleeping here in the states. But for some reason, looking at these charts really drove home the point for me. My big takeaway from this is the next time I send out my monthly Dynamics CRM News You Can Use email newsletter, you subscribers in Europe, Asia and India are going to get it in your inboxes during your daytime! (CoreMotives allows you to schedule its marketing emails, so I’m thinking a 3:00 AM CST/GMT -6 email might be just about right.)

And in case you think I’m concluding a lot from two days of data, it’s now 11:45 AM Friday, and here’s what the Page Views by Country Today chart looks like now:

Now the Americans are up and about. And it looks like my European, Asian and Indian readers are happily snoozing away. Pleasant dreams, friends; I’ll do a better job in future of sending you emails when you’re awake!