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How to Use SharpSpring and Google Analytics to be a Mega-Creep

By August 22, 2014 June 11th, 2018 Content Marketing

Depending on how you look at it, either we have a lot of useful tools these days that let us gather intelligence, or we have crazy science-fiction spy capabilities that we use to be extremely creepy.

Why can’t both be true? I never said I was Lucius Fox or anything.

lucius-fox-data

“On second thought…maybe I’ll keep it.”

Our creeping tool in chief is of course Google Analytics. From there we can see everything from the number of visitors to our site, how they got there, how long they stayed, how many pages they visited, where they’re located, what resolution their screen is, and on and on. Pretty much the only things we don’t know is what search terms they typed into Google if they arrived via search (for the most part, anyway, and unless it was a branded search) and a user’s personal information.

Enter SharpSpring. A jack-of-all-trades type, SharpSpring is not an analytics tool, nor a CRM, nor email marketing software, but it’s capable of doing all of these things. So let’s skip the labels and get into what makes SharpSpring useful to my “private eyes.”

VisitorID

Lurking at the end of the top nav in SharpSpring is a little thing called VisitorID. This tool gives you a profile of some of your website’s visitors, usually on a company level if the company is large enough to have an identifiable IP address. The details are usually fairly vague: company name, location, size, website, referral path, etc. Depending on the details available, however, you can get a list of contacts for the company, which is kind of creepy.

SharpSpring_Marketing_Analytics

The caveat here is that it takes a person to filter through the VisitorID results to see if there’s anything worth paying attention to. A lot of the times, the company listed will be an ISP, or the details are just too broad to determine any kind of intent. That’s why I think of VisitorID as radar: you can see a bunch of blips and get information like direction, speed, and altitude, but that’s about it.

But where VisitorID leaves off, creeping is picked back up by the…

Contact Manager

Well, that sounds innocent enough. But so did “The Manhattan Project.”

Alright, that’s being too dramatic. Really, though, once you get someone to fill out a SharpSpring form, you can take your creeping to the next level. Sure, now you have a name, email address, phone number, and whatever else, but now that visitor has a cookie too. And SharpSpring is watching.

Here you can get pretty deep, but I’ll stick to the basics. Based on what information is available and how a contact uses the provided email address, you can get a lot of information. Such as…

SharpSpring_Marketing_Analytics 2

You can also keep track of their activity as they return to your site directly, through search, or through an email you sent. Plus, you get all of the information available in Google Analytics like pages visited, time on page, even device and OS information. Still, it’s not as complete as Analytics.

SharpSpring_Marketing_Analytics 3

Cross-Referencing

If it’s feasible, if you really need the extra information, or if you’re really bored, you might consider cross-referencing some SharpSpring visitor data with Analytics. Here’s one easy example:

Our contact has a name. Meet [redacted]. Their email address is [redacted]. We know what day they visited, and hey, look at this–we know that they were using Windows in English, in the Philippines.

SharpSpring_Marketing_Analytics 5

Now we can go to Analytics, look at traffic from the Philippines on that day, and there they are!

SharpSpring Analytics

Cool, but creepy. Still, if this kind of information could get you that much closer to following up with and closing a lead, you’ll be glad you have it.