Building a Data-Driven Engine: Overhauling Visier's Analytics Stack
When I joined Visier, the company had aggressive growth targets to hit $50M ARR from $35M ARR in 18 months. Senior leadership was eager to scale demand generation, but as I audited their channels it became clear where I could make the most immediate impact and it wasn’t launching new campaigns.
You Can’t Scale a Demand Generation Engine If You’re Flying Blind
The web analytics infrastructure was fragmented. The user journey data simply wasn’t tied together. The team relied heavily on Marketo and while it’s a powerhouse for automation, it isn’t meant to be a standalone web analytics hub. We were missing the broader tracking solutions that we needed to connect closed-won deals directly back to top-of-funnel activities.
If we were going to scale successfully and hit those massive growth targets, fixing this gap had to be priority number one.
Architecting the Solution and Slashing Bloat
Getting this right wasn’t just a technical hurdle. I quickly learned I needed to navigate some deep organizational silos. At the time, marketing ops managed the Marketo implementation very closely, and data was heavily compartmentalized. Salesforce data was siloed with the sales engineering team and I needed to bridge the gap between those tools and my top funnel analytics in order to get critical insights to the people actually running the campaigns (me).
Since I had already built an end-to-end analytics engine at Procurify, I had a clear playbook. Standing up the core integrations was the easy part. I deployed a custom tracking system that pulled together Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, HotJar, Marketo, and Salesforce. This finally gave us the end-to-end visibility we were missing.
The real headache wasn’t setting up the new tools, it was cleaning house. The website was bogged down by old legacy vendor scripts hardcoded right into the HTML. Ripping out the bloat, figuring out which tags we actually needed, and moving them into GTM took a lot of heavy lifting.
But the payoff was massive. Consolidating our tags didn’t just fix our governance issues (meaning marketing could finally launch campaigns without submitting engineering tickets). It completely transformed our site performance. Because GTM loads tags asynchronously, the browser can render the page without waiting for bulky third-party scripts.
By moving everything into GTM and controlling exactly when scripts fired, we sped up mobile load times by 19% and saw a staggering 142% improvement on desktop. That speed boost was essential to make sure the traffic we bought actually stuck around long enough to convert.
Measuring the Impact of Data-Driven Campaigns
With the infrastructure finally in place, we could safely hit the gas on scaling our demand generation programs.
Our first big move was launching a highly targeted remarketing strategy. Enterprise B2B software sales require multiple, sustained touchpoints to properly nurture a lead. Because we finally had Google Analytics talking to Salesforce, we didn’t have to settle for retargeting generic website visitors. We could build highly accurate audience lists based on actual, high-intent user behaviors.
Integrating our analytics stack helped power our remarketing campaigns across LinkedIn and Google Ads and the results crushed industry benchmarks. We saw a 712% increase in CTR and a 710% boost in Engagement Rate on LinkedIn. Over on Google Ads, data-driven optimizations helped us bump our CTR by 129% and improved our overall landing page conversion rates by nearly 39%.
Overhauling this tech stack laid the foundation to a working engine that could drive revenue. By unifying our data and tracking the full lead lifecycle, we could scale demand gen programs in a measured way that maximized every dollar spent.
To scale Visier’s demand generation, we built an analytics infrastructure by ripping out bloated legacy scripts and unifying Google Analytics, Marketo, and Salesforce through Google Tag Manager. This gave us the full-funnel visibility we needed to launch highly targeted remarketing campaigns.
