What’s the Catch?
At first glance, Prismana® may look like it’s too good to be true. It’s not – but there are a few things that you have to do to use this platform. The financial and logistical benefits of Prismana more than outweigh the amount of initial work required to completely put the system to work. There is some implementation work required on your part. We’ve taken painstaking measures to minimize that work. Once the system is set up, there is no additional work to do unless you add additional channels you’d like to measure – and that work is limited to little more than configuring your Prismana admin console. We’ve also created a detailed knowledge base and a rock solid support team to help you every step of the way.
Why are we doing this?
Although this may not seem like it’s in our best interest to tell you that our product is anything less than perfect and requires zero effort to use, we feel it makes long-term sense to inform our potential customers of the small tradeoffs involved in using what, we feel, is a great solution for your business – if you are you are willing to put in a little bit of work upfront for larger upside down the road. Simply put, we’re exercising transparency. Here are the “catches”:
Implement Prismana
Implementing Prismana is fairly easy but it does have to be implemented by you. This consists of adding a snippet of code to every page of your site. This, realistically, should take you about 5 minutes to accomplish – the same amount of time it takes to implement Google Analytics or any other analytics platform. This is important in order to collect and deliver to you complete data. If the code is not on a page that contains a contact method, Prismana cannot do its job. If the code is not on a page the your visitors initially enter your site through, Prismana will not know to begin tracking them. Partial implementation is the biggest issue our initial clients had when we first introduced Prismana to our soft launch group.
Have systems in place to accept the data Prismana creates
Once Prismana does its job, your systems must be able to receive this information for reporting purposes. You will need dedicated contact mechanisms for every channel you plan on measuring. You will have to add this information into the Prismana admin panel. This information can take many forms. Common ones are:
- Channel Names
- Phone numbers
- Email addresses
- Promo codes
If you don’t have these, it’s impossible for Prismana to accurately attribute your inbound leads to their proper channels in a manner that will help you. Depending on how you have your systems set up, acquiring these dedicated contact mechanisms can be easy or a challenge. We recommend that you get these mechanisms together BEFORE you purchase a Prismana subscription so that you can begin using it right away.
- In the case of phone numbers, it is necessary to be able to understand what phone number is ringing your phones. Labeling the phone number (for brick and mortar businesses) or applying a “whisper function” (for mobile professionals) to each line have been shown to have the best results for capturing phone lead sources.
- In the case of email addresses, tagging emails based on the receiving email address have been shown to automate the process of understanding which email leads belong to which channels.
- For forms, our clients find that creating a hidden, pre-populated field for their forms is the easiest and most consistent way to have the channel source added to the contact form reports.
Once you have this contact information ready, it should take, realistically between 5 and 10 minutes to add them to the Prismana admin – significantly less time than it takes to configure any other analytics platform we have encountered.
Be consistent
The cornerstone to measuring anything is consistency. If you choose any particular contact method, you should use it for every channel you measure. If you are taking inbound calls and are measuring 15 channels then you should have 15 dedicated phone numbers in addition to your current default phone number to properly measure those channels. Tagging URLs that you use for your marketing efforts is the single best way to control the integrity of the data that Prismana creates for your systems. Tagging those URLs consistently is vital to obtaining clean and predictable information.
Understanding that Prismana, like just about any other system, requires some effort on your end to leverage is key to getting the most out of it. Prismana is more hands-on than some solutions you may have experience with. It also gives you greater benefits than those other solutions. The flexibility of Prismana is an advantage that allows you to customize your reporting to your needs without the need for multiple solutions that may not work well together.