Integrate Google Analytics to CRM Database and Forms

I had to create a post talking about this wonderful article from Justtin Cutroni (@justincutroni)at epikOne.

Justin posted an article on March '09 -- Integrating Google Analytics with a CRM

Basically, there is a configuration you can do on javascript so that you can capture Google Analytics values and throw it into forms, CRM, or other areas of datasets.

According to his explanation, you have to use javascript to extract data from Google Analytics, store it in hidden form elements, and attach it to the form when users hit that submit button.

Why this is a great idea? Well, a lot of simple sites, including my my site have a contact form, but it only parses the data entered by the users and other necessary values to make the parsing work properly (behind the scene).

Taking my contact form as an example, it only captures "Name", "E-mail", "Interest", and "Comments". Now with Justin's suggested configuration, you can pass along various Google Analytics values:

- Source (Possible campaign sources are Banner ad, Search PPC, Link Exchange, Newsletter, etc.)
- Medium
- Term
- Content
- Campaign Name
- Custom segmentation
- Number of visits

Wow... ok, what this means to me or you is that you can optimize the contact form to acquire not only the values we asked from the users, but all of these values from Google Analytics.

That means on an individual level, for example, I can tell Mr. ABC came from Google PPC, with the term "web analytics specialists", and had 4 visits before contacting me.

Some may say, you can do that in the Google Analytics tool. Well, you got to slow down and be careful about that comment. Note that it is against the Google Analytics terms of service to capture individual identity information.

That is why it is nice to see that Google Analytics data integrating directly to forms, emails (in my inbox), into external CRM database, etc.

For those who are running enterprise level CRM suite, this is probably a joke considering that those CRM solutions can dynamically capture way more data and perform segmentation. But for small sites, bloggers, or micro-sites running Google Analyitcs, I feel like this has opened a door to a new level of thinking in site tracking using Google Analytics.