Accelerate your thought leadership by contributing to our blog. Join our community of experts now!
Enjoy reading this blog post written by our experts or partners.
If you want to see what Databox can do for you, click here.
It’s absolutely crucial for any company to have a marketing and sales funnel that lets them visualize performance at each stage of the customer journey: From the moment they land on your website to the instant they become a paying customer, and even beyond.
When it comes to SaaS companies, many of these funnel stages take place on your website and in your product, and they can be tracked in Google Analytics 4 in the form of events.
Prior to GA4, companies would measure “Goals” in Google Analytics to track the performance of user behaviors they considered important. With the advent of GA4, you can track specific events in your marketing funnel, providing a deeper understanding of your customer’s journey. This knowledge isn’t just power — it’s the fuel for optimization, enabling you to refine your marketing strategies, enhance user experience, and, ultimately, drive growth.
To help you with that, we’ll delve into the key events that SaaS companies should be tracking in their marketing funnel and why they matter. And this wouldn’t be Databox if we didn’t have some hard data to share. All of our info is backed up by insights from industry leaders and survey data to help you understand how to effectively leverage GA4 for your SaaS business.
Obviously, the events each SaaS company tracks are going to be heavily dependent on their unique product, positioning, and growth stage. But there are certain events every SaaS company should be tracking — and we wanted to put together a resource to help you understand and start tracking them in GA4 (if you aren’t already).
Whether you’re a seasoned SaaS veteran or a newcomer to the industry, you’ll find something that will help you track your customer journey better.
Let’s dig in!
When it comes to SaaS, data is king. Well, if you ask us, data is king everywhere.
Data guides your decision-making, helping you understand what’s working and what’s not.
GA4 is one of the most potent tools at your disposal when it comes to tracking specific events within your marketing funnel. But how do you know if your numbers are actually good?
Unsurprisingly, the answer is more data; or benchmarks in this case.
Benchmarks provide a point of reference against which you can compare your own data. They give you a sense of where you stand in relation to other SaaS companies and help you identify areas for improvement. Let’s take a look at some key GA4 benchmarks for SaaS companies extracted from Databox Benchmark Groups.
According to our data the median number of Events per Session in May 2023, based on input from 110 contributors, was 5.78. Do note that the top quartile starts at 8.33 events per session, meaning that the top-performing companies significantly outstrip the bottom 50%.
The same Benchmark Group shows that the Event Count per User in May 2023 was 8.59 (median value, 104 contributors). In contrast, the top quartile starts at 12.24 events per user.
Finally, the average count of events in May 2023 (according to the same Benchmark Group) was 24.1K. The data shows a very lopsided distribution. The top quartile has 131.17 events or more, almost 6 times higher than the median and over 17 times more than the bottom quartile. It’s clear that the top performers perform really well.
Want to compare your own performance against this group? Join GA4 benchmarks for SaaS companies for free now.
If you ever asked yourself:
Databox Benchmark Groups can finally help you answer these questions and discover how your company measures up against similar companies based on your KPIs.
When you join Benchmark Groups, you will:
The best part?
When it comes to showing you how your performance compares to others, here is what it might look like for the metric Average Session Duration:
And here is an example of an open group you could join:
And this is just a fraction of what you’ll get. With Databox Benchmarks, you will need only one spot to see how all of your teams stack up — marketing, sales, customer service, product development, finance, and more.
Sounds like something you want to try out? Join a Databox Benchmark Group today!
While GA4 is undoubtedly a powerful tool that can provide you with invaluable insight into user behavior, you may be at a loss at how exactly it can help. What tangible results have companies experienced by using GA4?
For this report, we interviewed some of the top experts in the field and talked about their processes and best practices when it comes to event tracking.
We analyzed the information from 32 respondents, 87.5% of which are agencies working for SaaS and 12.5% are SaaS companies.
All of them use GA4, and more than half have been using it for over six months.Here’s what we found out from our survey:
Over 60% of our respondents agreed that GA4 has provided a clearer overview of activity across their digital properties, while more than half of the SaaS companies stated that GA4 has allowed them to create richer audience profiles, which have proven to be more likely to convert when targeted in campaigns.
Additionally, over 50% of our respondents noticed an improvement in their marketing investments, underscoring GA4’s role in bolstering marketing efficiency, while around half of the surveyed SaaS companies discovered strategic content gaps using GA4’s site search features. This indicates that the platform has some potential to aid content strategy formulation and execution.
Related: How to Track Conversions with Google Analytics 4: 7 Best Practices
A customer journey encompasses the entire process a customer goes through, from the initial discovery of the product to becoming a loyal user. Understanding and optimizing each stage of this journey is crucial for driving growth and success.
A typical marketing and sales funnel for a SaaS business tracks four to five key stages that companies may tweak depending on their needs and approaches. It’s possible to use a standard 5-stage funnel with each stage having its own assorted set of events, or to break down the funnel into four stages and have mid-content and long-tail funnels that are used to feed users into the primary funnel churn.
For the purposes of this article, we’re focusing on the five-stage funnel consisting of Acquisition, Conversion, Adoption, Navigation, and Retention. Do note that each stage needs to have specific goals and KPIs that help marketers measure and optimize their strategies.
Acquisition is by far the most popular stage, distantly followed by retention. Referral stage is even more distant last, receiving very little attention.
This stage involves attracting potential customers to the product. It’s the first point of contact between a user and the product, making it a critical area of focus. Almost half of the respondents (around 46%) indicated that they pay the most attention to this stage. This is likely because a strong acquisition strategy can significantly increase the top of the funnel, leading to more potential customers.
According to Nate Tower from Perrill, one of the company’s main goals during this stage is getting the customer to complete a demo request form, and tracking that event is crucial. However, it’s not just about tracking form interactions; it’s also important to capture scroll depth when the form is fully visible, including the submit button. This provides additional context to the user’s interaction with the form. Tower also notes that Perrill’s team doesn’t use the default form events in GA4 because they trigger a lot of false positives if you have other pixels installed.
Similarly, John Reinesch of Exponential Growth emphasizes the importance of setting up path exploration reports for each form submission. This provides insights on the pages users visited right before converting, which can help optimize the acquisition process. Reinesch also emphasizes the importance of setting up custom events, this time to filter out existing customers from acquisition data.
At this stage, Virginia Keenan from Patriot Software highlights the importance of tracking events leading to primary conversion events for marketing initiatives. “We have custom conversion events set up for any of our initial offerings, whether a demo of a certain kind to a free trial. This allows us to see how much interaction our marketing efforts are getting.”
Like most marketers, you’re probably interested in how much traffic comes to your website and how much of that traffic converts into new leads and customers. But digital marketers want to know more, right? Where is that traffic coming from, and how much of it comes from specific channels, like organic search, social media, and referrers? Which social media and referral sites? Now you can do that deeper dive from one dashboard connected to your Google Analytics 4 account, including key metrics like:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics 4 experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template that contains all the essential metrics for monitoring and analyzing your website traffic and its sources, social media networks and referral sites and pages. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics accounts with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Following Acquisition, Activation is the next crucial stage, which ensures the acquired customer effectively starts using the SaaS product. Around 15% of respondents indicated that they focus most on this stage.
Farhan Srambiyan from WPclerks suggests monitoring a variety of events during the Activation stage, including account creation, onboarding completion, first login, first feature usage, time spent in-app, and number of sessions. “By keeping track of these events, we can assess how successful our Activation stage is and guarantee that our users are well-onboarded and invested in the product. This leads to greater retention rates and, ultimately, revenue growth,” Srambiyan concludes.
PRO TIP: Learn how Stephanie Donily, Head of Content & Communications at Zapier, turned a successful blog into a full-funnel conversion driver.
After Activation, Retention becomes key. This is the stage where customers first find value in the product. Almost 20% of our respondents indicated that they focus most on this stage, highlighting the importance of maintaining a strong user base and reducing churn.
Marcus Arcabascio from Menu Price points out that monitoring and tracking customer behavior is crucial for customer retention. This data helps optimize the website, improve the bounce rate, create an effective customer retention strategy, and significantly improve the customer experience.
Related: 9 Customer Retention Metrics You Need to Start Tracking ASAP
The Revenue stage is where customers make a purchase or sign up for a paid plan. It’s a critical stage for driving business growth. Around 15% of respondents indicated that they focus most on this stage. That’s unsurprising as, converting visitors to customers is essential.
For example, Kinjal M. Vyas from Windzoon Technologies suggests focusing on the “purchase” event for revenue generation and ensuring it includes step-by-step details like accurate amount, currency, and a uniform transaction process. This tracking allows you to monitor revenue in your GA4 reports and analyze the performance of your e-commerce activities.
The Referral stage is all about turning your customers into advocates who will refer new customers to your SaaS offering. It’s a powerful way to acquire new customers. However, only a small percentage of our respondents indicated that they focus most on this stage, suggesting that it may be an underutilized strategy or that many SaaS companies simply haven’t seen much return from it.
Related: Here’s How to Increase Your Referral Traffic (Tips from 42 Marketers)
In an effort to identify the most crucial GA4 events that SaaS companies should track, we solicited insights from two experienced industry figures, Bulent Partal and Ché Köhler.
Bulent Partal is a seasoned digital marketer with a strong background in eCommerce and with significant expertise in leveraging analytics for business growth. He’s currently serving as the Chief Product & Strategy Officer at Segmentify, where he leads the transformation of the company’s product line into a Customer Engagement Platform. With a strong background in leading digital commerce sales and marketing operations at companies like D&R and Teknosa, he has demonstrated expertise in developing and executing strategic visions, managing product lines, and building data-driven strategies. Partal has a five-stage approach to GA4 event tracking, focusing on Acquisition, Conversion, Adoption, Navigation, and Retention.
On the other hand, Ché Köhler is a founder of nichemarket, a social online marketplace for South African entrepreneurs and SMEs. With a strong background in managing digital marketing operations, implementing SEO best practices, and developing e-commerce and omnichannel strategies, Che brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the digital marketing and SaaS landscape. He oversees a four-stage funnel focusing on Account sign-up, Users who registered but never created a listing, Users who created a business listing, and Users who request additional marketing services or support. Nichemarket also implements mid-content and long-tail funnels that are used to feed users into the primary funnel churn.
Each expert tracks different events with GA4 that align with their unique business objectives. With their help, we’ve assembled a comprehensive list based on their input about the most important event types to track.
Their combined insights shed light on how important it is to track a diverse set of GA4 events that align with the specific goals and KPIs of each business. This underscores the sheer versatility of GA4 as a tool that, when used effectively, can significantly enhance a SaaS company’s understanding of its users and its capacity to optimize the customer journey.
The journey starts with attracting potential users. This is measured by how your marketing strategies draw and keep their interest.
After capturing the interest of potential users, the goal is to convert them into leads and, eventually, customers.
Related: Blogging for Lead Generation: 23 Best Ways to Generate Leads from Your Blog
Understanding user interactions with your platform is key to enhancing the overall user experience.
The way users navigate your site informs their experience.
Customer loyalty is a powerful driver of growth.
Related: The 15 Most Important Customer Success Metrics for SaaS Companies
Content forms the backbone of any digital marketing strategy.
Every SaaS business is unique, and there are bound to be user actions that are critical for your specific business model. Custom events give you the freedom to define and track these specific actions, offering a deeper, more personalized understanding of the user experience.
Navigating through the complexity of Google Analytics 4 events can be a daunting task, especially when your aim is to extract actionable insights that could fuel your business growth. From tracking user acquisition and engagement to monitoring product usage and customer success, every data point adds a piece to the puzzle of understanding your customers’ journey.
Databox emerges as a solution to this challenge, providing a consolidated platform where you can visualize and analyze your GA4 events and other crucial business metrics in real time. By integrating Databox with Google Analytics 4, you will be able to:
In essence, Databox simplifies the complex task of data tracking, allowing marketers, product managers, and business owners to focus more on deriving insights and less on juggling between different data sources.
The power of real-time business intelligence is within your reach. Sounds too good to be true? Make sure for yourself how Databox can transform your approach to data analysis. Try Databox for free today and embark on a data-driven journey toward achieving your business goals.
Hey, we’re Databox.Our mission is to help businesses save time and grow faster. Click here to see our platform in action.
Are you maximizing your business potential? Stop guessing and start comparing with companies like yours.
At Databox, we’re obsessed with helping companies more easily monitor, analyze, and report their results. Whether it’s the resources we put into building and maintaining integrations with 100+ popular marketing tools, enabling customizability of charts, dashboards, and reports, or building functionality to make analysis, benchmarking, and forecasting easier, we’re constantly trying to find ways to help our customers save time and deliver better results.
Davor is an English literature graduate and an avid reader with a passion for languages. Working as a translator, editor, and writer has allowed him to learn about a wide range of topics — making him something of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to content. In his spare time, he reads, plays video games and boardgames, and runs/plays tabletop RPGs.
Get practical strategies that drive consistent growth