Intuit: Better data, better decisions

Intuit taps Google Analytics Premium: actionable insights available to all

Intuit’s flagship products – QuickBooks, TurboTax and Quicken – have been developed to revolutionize the way people manage their personal finances, run small businesses and pay employees. The company’s lineup of tax preparation products helps individuals and small business owners easily and accurately file their own taxes.

The Channel Marketing Team (CMT) at Intuit is a shared organization that serves three business segments — Financial Management Solutions (FMS), Employee Management Solutions (EMS) and Payment Solutions. Each of these segments provides several flagship products catering to the needs of small business. Recently CMT made a strategic decision to employ Google Analytics Premium to validate the data quality of its channel analytics and overcome existing gaps in channel data.

GA Premium increased the speed and accuracy of actionable data that drives our business.

Ken Wach, Vice President, Marketing

Scaling for success

Intuit worked with Blast Analytics & Marketing, a Google Analytics Certified Partner and Google Analytics Premium Reseller, to help create a solution usable across all business segments in a critical time window prior to the company’s peak season. The account, web property and profiles were all configured to mirror the Intuit organizational structure. This ensured that each business segment team could focus on its own ecosystem of page to perform analysis, while the CMT team could look across all business segments to derive shared learning. Intuit and Blast were able to implement the solution across the business segments within a month and extend the solution across global sites within a week.

Better data, better decisions

The implementation of Google Analytics Premium quickly produced a range of significant outcomes. First, traffic and conversion data quality immediately improved. Intuit discovered that prior to the implementation they had been under-reporting the success of traffic referred by SEO by approximately 50% for FMS and 27% for EMS, and conversions attributed to SEO had been under-reported by around 200% for FMS and 65% for EMS.

Democratizing web analytics

With Google Analytics Premium, it became possible for the Intuit channel analytics team to provide accurate data for SEO efforts tailored to each business need, and to provide insights capable of influencing business decisions in near real time. Since implementation, it no longer takes the team two days to provide insights – data and analysis requests can now be serviced in two hours.

Google Analytics Premium also fit into the strategic vision that CMT had in terms of democratizing Intuit’s data. Because Intuit’s solution is based on a self-service model of web analytics, marketers throughout the organization can now review data in real time and raise any questions or concerns to the analytics team immediately.

High data quality

Platform adoption and data accuracy is key for Intuit’s investment into Google Analytics Premium. Blast provided on-site training for more than 100 business users to ensure high adoption of the platform. Custom reports, dashboards, and segments were developed that can be shared across the organization. Additionally, on-going support is provided by Blast to support the business needs as the organization’s analytics needs evolve in a fast paced market.

Overall, Intuit has increased the level of confidence in the company’s data quality by introducing Google Analytics Premium into its toolkit. Intuit also has a governance process to periodically validate and audit the data to check for gaps in quality, and works to ensure the solution is consistently meeting the changing needs of each business segment.