Visitor Scoring for CRM Integration using Urchin Software and Urchin Hosted

Lead Scoring: The Holy Grail of Marketing Analytics

Many marketers I've talked to have a long-held desire to score leads in their CRM based on behavioral website usage data.  Yes, it is a concept wrought with privacy implications that have merit and must be considered, but presuming you've created a good privacy policy that governs how you'll use data and provides an opt-out method, we really should all be able to sleep at night AND score leads based on website usage and behavior.  And, with Urchin + the Urchin API it's more than possible!

Visitor Scoring with Urchin Software

Urchin Software from Google, the sibling product to Google Analytics, provides some fantastic opportunities for additional analysis beyond what Google Analytics provides.  Analytics Pros has recently launched Urchin Hosted, a cloud-based hosting service designed specifically for running Urchin and eradicating the high cost of IT normally associated with running Urchin software.

Using Urchin 6.602 running on Urchin Hosted, and with some slight customizations, goals and filters, I set up a visitor scoring mechanism and extract the data via the built-in Urchin Data Extraction API.  The results are exciting: visitor-level scoring data that can be cross-related to content consumption and exported via the API into anything of your choosing - a CRM, Excel, etc...

The scoring I used here is based on goal value settings created within Urchin, but you could just as easily export the data to another system and apply a scoring algorithm based on a combination of factors.  Perhaps you want to score based on region, content viewed, length of visit, and propensity to be a "techie".  You could export the raw data, keyed by a visitor ID value, and score against the pages viewed, time spent during the visit, and give a bonus to visitors using "chrome" or "safari" as the browser (extra points for Linux desktops!).

In Concept and in Practice

I'm really excited about the possibilities with Urchin.  The beauty is that you can so easily integrate Urchin if you're already using Google Analytics.  Urchin gives you complete control over your raw data and post-processed data, supporting this kind of export and analysis, as well as re-processing historical data if you want to apply a new set of filters, goal scores, etc...