← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
How To Align SEO With B2B Revenue Attribution
00:20:11
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- [00:00]
Tyson Stockton
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
- [00:43]
Hey, what's going on? My name is tyson from Previsible I.O. and joining me today is Stefan Hederbrandt, who is the CMO and co founder of Dream Data. DreamData provides innovative solutions for data driving market attribution and revenue analytics. Dream Data specializes in helping businesses optimize their marketing strategies and maximize roi. Its platform offers advanced insights and actionable intelligence to drive growth in decision making. Today, Stefan and I are going to be talking about how to align SEO with B2B revenue attribution. With that, here's my conversation with Stefan Hederbrandt, co founder and CMO at DreamData. Stefan, welcome.
- [01:25]
Stefan Hederbrandt
Thank you, Tyson. And I can definitely hear you frequently go to Germany in the way you say Stefan.
- [01:35]
Tyson Stockton
Little by little learning. It's a long, slow process.
- [01:38]
Stefan Hederbrandt
Yeah, that's great.
- [01:40]
Tyson Stockton
So we're talking data attribution here. And I think this is obviously it's a critical one because the potential in our careers impact the business. It's all about understanding one hour, I guess, impacting the business to make the right decisions, but then also from like the internal stakeholder management, just kind of general awareness for our work. It's such a critical piece here. You called out in this one B2B. So maybe if we can kind of start there and if you can help the listeners kind of better understand, like what are some of the nuances, what are some of the, like, challenges that may be greater, more present in B2B than a B2C type organization.
- [02:25]
Stefan Hederbrandt
Yeah, happy to, Tyson. And maybe, maybe I should just take a step back and try to explain attribution a little bit less technical than the word itself. So as a kid growing up, I was playing computer games, as many other kids, and a lot of times you'd see that there would be cheat codes for these computer games. So you type in something to the computer game and you get extra powers or extra energy or something like that. And to me, the cheat codes for business to be Successful at work is really knowing what works and what doesn't work. So what the word attribution just means for me is that you're able to explain how are we winning customers, which paths do they take? What things can we replicate? So I'm just deeply curious about what are the cheat codes out there for B2B and B2. The cheat codes for B2B very much is comes in the form of shape of knowing kind of your. The accounts that you win, they look at this ad, they go search and land on this page. They end up buying six months later and so on. So it's a kind of a pursuit of trying to understand what's going on in B2B when we win deals. And SEO was actually my first love in marketing. So I've had my fair share of work in this industry. And the reason why it was my first love was that I came out of university working for this vintage music instrument platform back 15 or more years ago, maybe actually more. Where we were was kind of one of these places where you could sign up as a vendor that had music instruments in your shop and then we would list them on this platform that then had tens of thousands of instruments and then we would drive traffic to your website. Back then like these guitar shop owners had zero respect for actually receiving a thousand views of a specific on a specific guitar. It would be like a Fender Stratocaster 1975 black. That search kind of we that we wanted to show up when people search for that. And we were massively successful in going from zero to six digit numbers in organic traffic every month. But that business still went bankrupt a few years after I left. And the problem was that it's not enough to be successful with organic search. You need to produce business outcomes with the traffic. We really, really managed to do well in terms of building up a lot of traffic for this website. And it still bothers me today that we didn't make it a success. But what was not working was our ability to focus our attention on the pages that were actually producing revenue. So we build up a lot of great, I don't know what you call it nowadays, but interest in the website itself. But the business part of the website just didn't work out. And as I said, it haunts me today. And that's kind of why I'm so, so interested in this topic of trying to understand what which you could call attribution.
- [05:30]
Tyson Stockton
It feels like at the stage of the industry too it's more and more common to hear CRO and Like, I think, I don't know, if I go back maybe six years or so, like in my career, I feel like a lot of conversation in SEO was like, oh yeah, we bring the traffic to the website, then it's someone else's problem of what to do with that traffic. And I think as SEOs, like we shied away from that aspect, which is, you know, a disservice because then you're kind of missing out in completing, you know, the actual impact of it. So how do we maybe like, let's get to that cheat code. Like how, how do we kind of connect the dots and measuring like better measuring the success of SEO, like especially in B2B. And I'm assuming with this you're going to have, you're going to, you know, longer or probably in most cases like longer sales cycles, more touch points, probably across like multiple channels as well where you have an SEO user that's in hitting an ad. Yeah, like how do you start to like make that more transparent or digestible for us as SEOs?
- [06:45]
Stefan Hederbrandt
Yeah, I'll be happy to explain a bit about this, Tyson. I think first of all, if we do the simple kind of B2C versus B2B, if I search a pair of running shoes that I'm looking to buy right now, I might hit them up on Google. The first website I end on, I go through the checkout, buy them. They had the size I needed. So here the impact of SEO is obvious. You ranked 1, I arrived at the website, we made money. That's great. But in B2B, what that looks like, we actually put out some benchmarks just two weeks back. About the average length of B2B customer journey journeys on our customers, which is based on thousands of customer journeys. The average length is 211 days. So from first touch on an account until somebody buy is 211 days. And the reason or the way we can actually do this is the, you know, you can build this yourself if you have a big team of data engineers. But what we do at the company I co founded, Dream Data, is the retake all customer journey data out of whatever silos that it resides in today. So that means we have a proprietary tracking script that you put on your website that as soon as somebody arrives to the website gets assigned a unique anonymous id. And when people push through forms, we're able to consolidate the anonymous ID with a known user and we can backtrace all the visits that person had to our website and we stitched that together into an account based journey and this is where you need to understand the difference in B2B versus B2C. As part of those benchmarks we put out, we could see that an average of six people were part of account journeys for B2B companies. And this is a huge problem for us that does SEO. If we don't have a technology like this available, because the people that starts the journeys, that's typically where we as SEOs can kind of impact the journey. Somebody's searching, we appear. But in B2B buying cycles, then there's like, there's a committee of people that you need to convince and the one that does the research and like builds the vendor list are not the people that kind of ends up being the economic buyer and signs the contracts. So we as SEOs, we might be the sender of the first visit to the website, but the purchase six months later is never going to be able to be traced back to us actually appearing in that search. And that's what we're fixing with the product that I helped co found dream that you can actually go and say this was the person that started the journey and now you won this journey through another person six months later. But it's all part of the same journey. So you can basically monitor all organic visits to the website and then trace that to revenue later on. And in B2B revenue comes from a CRM system, quite typically it doesn't come from like an E commerce platform. So this, that's kind of built into it as well that we can see which accounts you win, how much they're worth, and where did they start from? And I'll give you a simpler example so you don't have to wait 211 days. But even when we have a demo call booked on our own website, it takes an average of five sessions. The last session would always be direct because people know us, they're familiar with what we do, and now they trust us. But that's not what we, that's not the cheat codes. We can't just make more people go directly to our website and book a demo. You need to trace it back to the first visit. And the first visit is quite typically always a marketing activity, whether it's a paid ad or an organic visit or somebody who coming from social, we need to be able to actually show and understand of Those thousands of URLs that we have on our website what are quite typically the first touch on these journeys that actually end up becoming demo calls. And if you look and ask in the CRM system, the CRM System will say original source, direct, great. But that doesn't say anything about where the actual demand started from. And this is where the value of SEO is being downplayed immensely by CRM systems today.
- [10:48]
Tyson Stockton
Is that early, early identification as far as though making those connections, like, and it's whether it's kind of more of the general how it's approached in the industry or even like how your business is handling it. Like, how are you making those connections from one user to another user in the same organization? Is it like giving a weight or a percentage of a lead to the various kind of touch points? Or are there other ways of identifying different users and part of that journey?
- [11:23]
Stefan Hederbrandt
So like the business we're in, we're not in the guessing discipline, we're in the deterministic industry. So what we build for our customers is like a table of Tyson did this on this day, Stefan did this on this day. And then multiple people take part of the same evolving journey from this account. So we only talk about stuff where we actually know something happened. We can also do account level stuff. So if we're able to match the IP address of an anonymous visitor, we can also say that this account's journey that passed through six people actually started with somebody who were anonymous that looked at this URL and then later on become a customer. Then the attributable value is kind of a number that depends on whatever attribution model that you select. Which for me is not always that interesting because it becomes a bit of a, bit of a guesswork. But the actual mapping of every touch is super valuable because you want to be able to kind of generalize the activities that you do that kind of correlates with more, more sales pipeline and revenue. And here an activity can also be somebody googling ending up on the same article every single time.
- [12:40]
Tyson Stockton
No. And I feel like within this approach, I guess the tactic kind of right in front of you is like optimize and improve the pages that are having the highest kind of touch points at that early stage. Within that, are you also thinking about as far as like, how do we maybe improve the quality of the users kind of passing through each one of those pages? Or then is it great they're looking at this comparison guide, let's make sure that that's performing as well as it can in search so that we like kind of widen that funnel? Like, I guess there's always that trade off of like widening the funnel versus making it highly targeted. Like, how do you, how do you think about that balance?
- [13:27]
Stefan Hederbrandt
No, I I definitely buy the argument as well that SEO can kind of play some kind of role in let's call it brand awareness, that you start ranking on words that have kind of very little to do about buying behavior within your niche. So that is true. I think it's, it has its place. But it's also something where you should be very careful if you're having a marketing budget running for retargeting. Because in B2B you it really does matter how big is the company, which industry it is, is it in which job function are people in. So doing retargeting on the networks that doesn't offer you like a B2B filtering option becomes a bit dangerous. What I'm basically saying is if you do retargeting on SEO traffic on LinkedIn, great because you can actually do all the actual B2B filtering. But on Google display, network meta ads, other places you have zero control of whether it's kind of it's a college student that is researching something or if it's a CMO at a thousand people company. So that's kind of the like the trade off when you do this like more like brand awareness SEO where you just do keyword analysis, find some big words that has a low keyword, what's it called, low competition keywords, but not a lot of actual buying behavior. So I guess it's that trade off where, where you have to kind of judge whether is it worth just trying to rank stuff or do you actually want to study buying behavior and trying to push more of those people to your website. And I can tell you if you ask your sales team who they will say they want more of. But it's not to say it's either or it's just to say yes, do your keyword analysis, find the niches where you can drive traffic. But don't forget also to have projects where you actually study whether the traffic becomes money afterwards.
- [15:20]
Tyson Stockton
Well, and it feels like this is a very timely or like I guess important stage to be looking at this because the waters are getting further murky just based on, you know, Google aio and as you have more and more of that experience met within the actual search results page, how do you then kind of attribute value if you didn't have maybe the actual click in that sense, but you're still having the early stage kind of branding awareness touchpoint with a consumer that you can then bring in later, but now the touchpoint may be off like outside of your domain.
- [16:01]
Stefan Hederbrandt
It's super interesting. I'm sure we'll see a huge consultancy, podcast tool industry arise. Just to kind of describe that the value of these kind of zero click.
- [16:13]
Tyson Stockton
Engagements, I mean, and I think there's no way around it, at least for us as SEOs, because we're going to be at least it's, I don't know my feeling that it's like the same way we're talking about Google. It's like you're going to have to bring in some alternative search engines and as they become more and more verticalized and specialized in service, we're going to have to similarly be. And I think the, the irony part too is the, the swing or the sway of interest now within Bing, which has been dormant for so many years and now has become the common talking point in a lot of these, you know, conferences and things like that. When people look at perplexity and chatgpt and then you look at the correlation of Bing results like, I think that's, you know, we're just going to have more and more conversations around how do you understand success across more than one search engine as well?
- [17:09]
Stefan Hederbrandt
Yeah, and it used to be like, get Google in place and then you don't have to worry about anything else.
- [17:15]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah. Then hands off, just let it, let it ride. But I feel like, I mean, even though maybe that's extrapolating a little bit from what we're talking about with like data attribution, it's a further complexity. But I think to me it further kind of pushes that need for clarity of where attribution is happening. Because if we are just looking at rankings within Google traditional search, like we're not even seeing the entire interaction touch point with the audience base that we're going after.
- [17:50]
Stefan Hederbrandt
I think what I'm, I guess what I'm trying to say is for the SEOs to think about what pays their salary and what pays people's salary are that the sales team sell more and we should think more holistic about instead of just delivering. Here's the rank. I'll go home now. You should think about, can I actually, can I monitor the traffic that arrives to this website? If it converts to a free signup or a demo that gets booked, does that look like somebody we normally sell to? Does it convert at a higher rate to new business? How long does it take for it to convert to this? So there's so much more than just getting the organic visit to the website that could be valuable for you as an SEO to study.
- [18:35]
Tyson Stockton
100%. All right, so that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Stefan Hederbrandt from Dream Data for joining us in part two of this conversation, which we're going to be continuing on similar topic, but we're going to be discussing why SEO is more than driving traffic and it's driving revenue. If you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about Stefan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in their show notes or go on over and check out his company's website at dreamdata IO.
- [19:06]
Ben Schapp
Okay, thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben jschapp B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.