How ngrok is Merging Content and Usage Patterns to Accelerate Revenue Growth

The Who

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ngrok is an all-in-one software solution helping millions of developers make their websites, apps, and devices available on their global edge quickly and securely.

Doug Haas is ngrok’s Head of Demand Generation, where he focuses on go-to-market campaign design and planning that drives revenue. As a result, he regularly has to measure and report on the impact of his team’s work on business objectives.

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The Problem

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ngrok was struggling to map out and track the entire customer journey. Haas’ team could see certain data points around first-touch and last-touch attribution, but getting any more nuanced information was practically impossible with the company’s previous set of tools.

With thousands of developers signing up every day, understanding what content and what channels were impacting the journey from awareness to activation to purchase was critical.  The team at ngrok needed to understand what was working and why!

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The Requirements

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One of the most important things Haas wanted was to be able to demonstrate the value of certain investments, as well as better allocate resources for efficiency, optimization, and real results.

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This meant they needed to answer, among other things:

• What content was most relevant to their target audience of developers?
• Through what channels are potential customers being driven further along the pipeline, from first visit to sign-up to purchase?
• Which channels provide the most ROI, and which provide the least?
• What parts of ngrok’s website drive the most engagement and conversions?
• Beyond interactions such as clicks and webinar attendance, what content also leads to sign-ups and closed-won deals?
• With a limited paid ad budget, where and at what scale can they best attract their ideal customer in this area?

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The Alternatives

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Before HockeyStack, ngrok’s marketing department was using Google Analytics, which Haas said was very limited in terms of attribution methods.

“We really needed a multi-touch, multi-channel attribution platform to be able to demonstrate attribution all along the user journey, not just first-touch or last-touch.”

Haas and his team were familiar with similar models to HockeyStack, such as Bizible and Full Circle Insights, but several members had worked at companies that had implemented HockeyStack in the past and believed its cookieless tracking was a major perk. 

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“Most of our user base is developers, and most of them run ad blockers…We narrowed down our final two selections between HockeyStack and Hubspot — Hubspot because we own it already, and HockeyStack because you have the cookieless tracking, which is unique in the industry, and the fingerprinting solution.”

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“That was a huge benefit, a huge driver in our selection process: being able to track more of our user base,” he added. Because of how common blockers are in ngrok’s industry, this would have been a massive barrier to overcome for Haas’ team without the proper platform.

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The Insights

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ngrok has been able to gather tremendous insight already in their early use of HockeyStack.

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One key metric Haas uncovered was which pages on ngrok’s website led to the most sign-ups and purchases — something he had never been able to visualize and measure clearly before. 

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“We had built groups of pages for our website, so we have use-case pages, product pages, and we also have docs and guides, blogs, webinars — each one of the main sub-menus on our navigation,” he explained. “And so we had built groups in HockeyStack and built a report on that. What floated to the top in terms of content that most people used in their user journey, from sign-up all the way to purchase, was docs and guides.”

“It makes sense — we’re a developer tool [and] platform, and people need to know how to use our product,” he added. “But we weren’t able to demonstrate that in terms of a customer journey.”

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The Results

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Haas was first impressed by the speed at which HockeyStack integrated into their team’s systems and workflows, and how simple it was to go from signing a contract to getting their dashboards up and running. 

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“I’ve implemented Bizible in the past and Full Circle Insights, and those implementation timelines were much longer than we experienced with HockeyStack,” he said. He added that the starter dashboards they were handed by HockeyStack’s team were “excellent,” leading to a quicker turnaround for further expansion and customization.

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They also had an easier time making decisions and used fewer resources on their end, making the entire partnership feel more valuable as an investment compared to others they’ve adopted. 

“The HockeyStack solution is much more transparent, much quicker, and the speed-to-value… was much quicker than what I’ve experienced in the past."

In response to the insights around high engagement on certain website pages, Haas immediately reallocated budget so that someone could directly focus on and own documents and guides, build out their library, and drive more growth. 

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Exploring subpages spurred a second valuable insight and new business goal: “What happens is people come to ngrok through organic and direct, and they sign up and they use docs and guides [on] how to use the product. But then they convert, [and] they look at our security pages. And so our hypothesis is, they discover, ‘Okay, we can use ngrok. It solves our needs, but is it secure?’ And so they go look at our security pages and our data platform pages, and then they find out, yeah, we are a secure solution.” This inspired him to prioritize the content and distribution of his security pages.

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Based on the success of its first implementation phase, Haas is excited to next narrow in on the user journey for a specific, top-priority product: API gateways. “We want to understand, what types of users, and what content do they experience, at what time and at what point of their journey — and from what channels are they coming from? — so that we can optimize that path [and] reduce any friction points, so that we can accelerate revenue with that specific subsegment of our user base,” he said.

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Additionally, he’s eager to marry HockeyStack’s pipeline data on its marketing website with ngrok’s own transactional usage data for its product, and develop predictive usage signals to forecast future content strategy and revenue opportunities. Finally, Haas is currently collaborating closely with HockeyStack to reverse-engineer the journey of converted customers to understand what drives sales.

“We’re merging HockeyStack data with our in-product data to identify predictive usage signals for product adoption. By combining user journey data with predictive signals, we will have the insights we need to develop new content, invest in the channels that resonate with our audience, and accelerate revenue growth.”

Learn more about how HockeyStack helps marketing, revenue, and sales teams surface and action insights by playing with the interactive demo or booking a demo with our team.

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