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One of the best parts of online marketing is the level of information available to you. You can tell when most people visit your website down to the precise minute of the day. You can tell which keywords deliver the most visitors to your site. You can know exactly how many people visit your site via their desktop computers versus their mobile devices. All this information is crucial for helping you streamline and optimize your lead generation website to deliver the highest possible ROI for your online marketing campaign. In turn, that optimized website delivers the optimum number of new customers and pumps new lifeblood into your business.
However, even with the level of information available to Internet marketers, there still can be some blind spots that can create serious problems. Here at PPC marketing agency Straight North, we’ve discovered one of these blind spots. It happens when online marketers take raw conversion numbers from Google Analytics as an accurate reporting of how many sales leads their lead generation websites are delivering.
However, the truth is that those raw conversion numbers don’t provide the level of granularity online marketers really need. Not only do the numbers ignore sales leads generated by phone calls, but they also don’t distinguish between conversions that are sales leads and those that aren’t. Because nearly half of all website conversions aren’t true sales leads, those raw conversion numbers are not as helpful as marketers lead themselves to believe.
Perfecting the Process
All of this underscores the importance of implementing lead validation and tracking into an online marketing campaign. By building additional reporting into a campaign, marketers can gain a better perspective on the data their sites provide. This leads to marketers having better information and allows them to make more informed decisions about their websites, this article explains things in more detail.
To ensure that your lead generation website can provide you with more detailed information about your conversions, you need to:
- Confirm that the primary contact form on your website has a “comments” field and that it is a required field.
- Confirm that your website is running Google Analytics.
- Confirm that your website is running on a content management system that stores each form submission in a table with a unique ID assigned to it.
- Modify your Google Analytics code to pass the form submission ID to Google Analytics using a custom dimension.
Tracking phone calls is an important dimension to add to a lead generation campaign because a substantial number of people still prefer to connect with a company over the phone as opposed to email. To implement phone call tracking, you should:
- Find a call tracking vendor that can track each phone call back to a specific marketing source.
- Implement the call tracking vendor’s code on your website to start tracking phone calls.
- Make sure your phone call tracking vendor can provide you with a single tracked phone number that you can hardcode on your website to replace your business phone number.
Following these steps can ensure that your lead generation website is providing you with all the information you need — not just some of it.
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About the Author
Matt Cannon is Director of Web Services at Straight North, an Internet marketing company in Chicago that specializes in SEO, PPC, and web design services. Cannon manages all web development activities, making sure that each project is applying current development standards and techniques.
