Announcing, The Flow: your SaaS growth bible  

How Whatfix Optimizes Their Content With HockeyStack

Employees 1001-2500
Industry B2B SaaS
Location United States

Key Results

✔️ 2x increase in content-influenced opportunities

✔️ 15% increase in opportunities

✔️ 32% increase in won deals

Problem

We have invested a considerable amount of budget and resources into our content marketing strategy the past few years, and the initial phases of this strategy were to build topic clusters and map keywords, develop processes (SEO checks, freelance management, publishing, etc.), and creating technically-SEO sound page designs and navigation. This all began to work quite rapidly.

The Whatfix Blog scaled from 40,000 sessions/month to 300,000+ sessions/month over the course of a year. While this traffic acceleration was excellent, our attribution lagged far behind. The content team I inherited still used UTMs on all of our CTAs and internal links.

That was the only way they were tracking attribution. I worked with our web development and sales operations teams to build a “first-source” content marketing field in Salesforce that captured opportunities generated from web visitors whose first touch point was a Whatfix blog, and then their very next step was to request a demo. , Outside of that, we had no insights into the impact of our traffic on opportunities of other sources, the number of content touchpoints that influenced opportunities, what articles were driving traffic to our “high-intent” content, and so forth. I began to search for an attribution and analytics tool built for content marketing teams to help us evolve our reporting and attribution – and that is how I discovered HockeyStack.

Approach

With Hockeystack, I insert a line of code into our website and integrate our sales-related tools (Salesforce, Pardot, Drift) with a few simple clicks – allowing me to bypass our development team entirely. With Hockeystack, our content team can now:

  • track “first-source” content opportunities automatically – previously, this was a manual process.
  • track “content-touchpoints” to understand how content influence our pipeline and showcase its impact across opportunities that we previously had no data on.
  • map prospect journeys to understand what content drives visitors to our “high-intent” pages, as well as identify those “high-intent” pages.

One of our biggest “aha!” moments with Hockeystack came with the “users” view, which allows us to identify individual prospects that are engaging with our website and track all marketing/sales/website interactions right in the tool. This was not something I previously thought we needed from Hockeystack. We have a large number of opportunities that are unattributed or are marked “direct”, “no source”, or a generic “organic” tag. With the “users” dashboard, I can now search those unattributed leads and opportunities in Hockeystack, which has revealed a huge gap in our attribution reporting. A significant chunk of those with no attribution come back with a detailed history of how they came to our website, the journey they took to request a demo, and the steps they took to become a new Whatfix customer. With Hockeystack, I’ve been able to identify over 2x more content-attributed opportunities that were previously missed.

We get the most value from:

  • The users panel
  • Our content KPI dashboard (Content Influence dashboard) that shows us what % of opportunities are viewing the blog, what % of demos view the blog, what blog posts drive leads/closed wins, what articles drive users to “high-intent” pages, first-source content generated opportunities, and the overall number of opportunities that have a content touchpoint.
  • Journeys. We have bucketed “steps” of prospect journeys, which include “views pricing,” “views a high-intent page,” “views blog,” “views an alternative page,” “requests a demo,” etc. We can now create reports that start with any page (ie. our newly launched homepage), and understand what % of users are taking these actions – and which paths convert the best.

With GA4’s clunky UI and overall disappointing rollout, I hope to use Hockeystack as much as possible to replace any report I previously used UA to create and track.