Most businesses have very little idea where their leads and sales come from, simply taking the natural highs and lows in their stride and continuing with the same strategy they outlined from the get-go.
Making sales is the ultimate goal of any business, but if you’re not tracking where your leads and sales come from you’re missing a big opportunity. If you can find out from that new customer exactly what led them to you, you can proactively tailor your marketing strategy to do more of what’s been proven to work.
By focusing more on data analysis and measuring your marketing efforts, you’ll be able allocate your marketing budget based on true performance – spending more on what works and less on what doesn’t – in order to improve the quantity and quality of your sales leads.
Where do leads come from?
Inbound leads will mostly come to you via telephone or website visits, but there are many sources that drive customers to make that original contact.
To start evaluating the source of leads it’s common to code them, which allows you to track your marketing and PR activity more effectively. Inbound leads are a direct result of your promotional efforts and without tracking your inbound leads, you won’t be able to tell which source has performed best.
Monitoring your inbound leads is simple. In this article we look at five sources you can track and how to do it.
1. The online search journey
Customers begin the decision-making journey long before they ever arrive with you, and you can effectively track this path to purchase by monitoring the keywords and phrases customers are using.
Depending on where they are in the search journey, the terms customers use will differ. Customers mostly begin searching with a wide net using broad search terms, and gradually become more specific as they refine what they’re looking for.
By evaluating the search journey paths from your marketing reports you can understand which keywords are most relevant to your business and how you can be using them more effectively.
2. Page tracking
Page tracking allows you to monitor which lead sources have directly resulted in an action being performed on your website, such as entering contact details or making an enquiry.
By placing code on a landing page that only reveals itself once the user has completed a business-valuable action (submitting contact details; making payment, and so on), you can then determine your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).
Google Analytics Acquisition Reports is a great tool for tracking the keywords and channels that are most valuable to your business, allowing you to focus your marketing efforts on the sources that are driving ROI.
3. Click tracking
One step up from page tracking is click tracking, or event tracking. This allows you to measure actions on your site that don’t lead to specific pages, such as watching an embedded video.
Click tracking, like page tracking, allows you to measure the journey users take before performing your chosen actions, showing where they came from and which search terms they used. This can be done using Google Analytics Tracking Codes, by installing codes on the pages you want to monitor.
By identifying which search terms drove positive actions on your site, you can refine your content strategy to convert more customers.
4. E-Commerce CPA
If you’re an e-commerce business, you can embed an e-commerce tracking code to monitor how customers are interacting with your products online. This way, you can see exactly what it’s costing you to make each sale and which traffic and keyword sources led the sale in the first place. Using Google Analytics, you can determine what your revenue is per traffic source and which keywords are the most valuable to your business.
Tracking CPA in this way allows you to refine your marketing strategy to bring cost down and adjust your prices to increase your profit margin.
5. Call tracking
All this online tracking is well and good, I hear you say, but what about the leads that don’t come through your website? Although you’re likely to see far fewer leads offline than online, the sales leads you get via phone are often the most valuable for your business.
Once upon a time, the only real method for tracking telephone leads was to ask customers when they called in where they heard about the business. Nowadays, the technology we have to track offline leads is much more sophisticated.
Businesses such as Mediahawk have created powerful call tracking software that every self-respecting marketer makes use of, allowing businesses not only to track offline traffic sources but to provide valuable data on each call.
Conclusion
By tracking your sales leads effectively from source to sale you get a comprehensive picture of how your marketing spend is driving performance, allowing you to refine your marketing strategy in line with your results. In short, effectively measuring your sales leads will allow you to drive increased ROI, cut unnecessary spend on underperforming channels and ultimately, make more sales. And that’s the ultimate goal of any business, right?
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