How to Optimize for B2B

By Nicole Hanson

October 26, 2021

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B2B websites face some unique challenges in A/B testing and digital optimization versus B2C sites. Your target audience is typically a group rather than an individual, and you may be dealing primarily with site users behind a portal or login. Further, B2B sites typically sell items at a larger scale or a higher price point, have a long sales cycle, and often a deep pre-purchase educational process. Other B2B sites’ primary site conversions are lead generation or enrollment, or focus on services, which can be a challenge to tie directly to revenue. Regardless of the specifics of your B2B site, there are unique A/B testing and optimization strategies you can apply to make the most of your goals.

Better Metrics for B2B Sites

Because many B2Bs have a longer sales cycle with a deeper education process than a B2C site would, purchases aren’t the best KPI. For many B2Bs, the actual purchase doesn’t even happen online. Think through and measure what website activities correlate to sales and revenue and focus on those conversions. For example, if you have a lead generation form, that is a great place to start. From there, you can work backwards to understand what behaviors correlate with form conversions. Look at content downloads, time on page, repeat visits, or users from the same company. You can also consider metrics like scroll depth to understand engagement with content.

If you are a B2B ecommerce site, you’ll of course still focus on the traditional add to cart and checkout, but it may take longer for users to get there if they need to go through budget approvals or coordinate across teams before purchasing. Include metrics like number of items viewed, times viewing the same item, site visits, or visits before purchase to better understand the sales cycle.

Target and Personalize for B2B

If your B2B site has services behind a login portal, targeting and personalization can actually be easier and more effective than you might think. When a user logs in, you can assign them a unique user ID through SiteSpect. You can then upload a list of user IDs to a data set that you curate and use that data set as a trigger in SiteSpect. This means you can create unique experiences for any group of users to improve the user experience to as granular a level as you’d like.

For example, one of our clients offers health insurance, and both corporate administrators and individual users access a login portal. By creating unique data sets, they can offer unique experiences for each company and each role type within the company. So corporate administrators see messaging and promotions relevant to company policies, while individual subscribers see information about their own coverage.

Correlating Behaviors to Revenue

Finally, even with all of the above strategies, it can still be challenging for B2B sites to correlate user behavior to revenue. Capturing thoughtful metrics will get you a lot of the way there, but to really understand how your site impacts revenue you’ll need to take it another step further. The first way to do this is to segment your data. If a blog you post gets a lot of traffic, but none of that traffic submits a lead generation form, is that successful to you? But what if a lot of those readers are current customers?

The same way that you can target experiences based on curated data sets, you can also segment your data based on these lists of users. When a visitor hits your site, SiteSpect can assign them a unique user id. As they perform certain behaviors on the site, they can be added to relevant audience lists which allows you to look at subsets of users for each metric. Similarly, when a company purchases your product or service, any user who identifies themselves (via email address or otherwise) as part of that company can be added to a curated list, so you can look at user behavior just for those who already use your services.

Finally, with SiteSpect you can even create metrics for offline conversions. EnergySage (not a B2B, but with a relevant use case) did this to track manually generated leads. If you segment by users who completed an offline purchase, you can get an even clearer picture of how behavior ties to revenue.

B2B Optimization with SiteSpect

SiteSpect’s flexibility means you can optimize and A/B test no matter what your site’s goals are.

To learn more about SiteSpect, visit our website.

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Nicole Hanson

Nicole Hanson

Nicole Hanson is a former Marketing Manager at SiteSpect.

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