Tracking Your Website Leads
Over the years I have come to the concussion that one of the hardest tasks in running and growing your own business is being proactive with marketing and tracking and narrowing down the credible marketing sources that actually produce quality leads. These are the ones you can convert into valuable customers and generate Return on Investment (ROI) for the business owner.
As business owners, we get bombarded on a daily basis with a slew of advertising proposals. These range from outbound marketing channels like television and billboards to inbound marketing avenues such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), PPC (pay-per-click) marketing that in the long run provide same type products but with their own glorified fancy labels.
As we have been taught before, it’s always important to have an open mind toward various advertising avenues and decide to involve yourself in the appropriate advertising campaigns based on your marketing objectives and business goals. Basically, narrow down on the marketing channels and avenues that best fit your business growth objective.
After starting your advertising efforts on various marketing channels, it become very important to track the outcome of each one of these, including things such as:
- Number of lead generated from the source
- Quality of each lead generated
- Number of leads "converted" to paying customers
- ...and, of course, individual ROI breakdowns
The question then comes to: “What is the best way to track the source of those leads and type of lead generated?”
With our constant quest for “bettering” our services as a website design and online marketing company, and providing our customers with valuable tools that would allow them to grow their business, we designed and developed a custom software feature that allows our clients to track the source of each lead. The tracking software tracks the “referring website” of the origin of the contact and the keyword term the visitor used to find their business from that origin.
The feature has proven itself to be very useful. Our customers can now narrow down on the source of their leads, differentiating between various marketing avenues weather it’s SEO efforts on Google, Yahoo or Bing, PPC programs from different channels or other lead generation sources/companies that they might have decided to try out to help them market their company. After narrowing down on the number of leads generated, our clients can calculate the ROI for each marketing effort and in turn decide weather or not that marketing effort should be continued or stopped.
After receiving this valuable data with each website lead/contact, our clients can then further implement advanced tracking methods and generate conversion analytics to advance their marketing strategies and alter them based on their generated analytics reports.