Telemarketing Software Featured Article

If there’s a faulty link anywhere in your company’s supply chain, it can fall apart quickly. A dysfunctional warehouse, unreliable carrier or any other kind of inefficiency can throw your entire business out of sync and make it that much more difficult to reach the level of success you want. It’s the same way in the supply chain within your Internet marketing campaign. There’s a common inefficiency lurking deep within the supply chain that funnels new customers to you, but odds are you’re probably not even aware it exists. The inefficiency is embedded in the data your lead generation website gives you about its performance, but there are ways to resolve it.

The Weakest Link

Most Internet marketers rely on the raw conversion numbers provided by Google (News - Alert) Analytics as the measure of how successful their lead generation sites are. The problem with this is that those numbers don’t distinguish between conversions that are actual sales leads and those that aren’t. Because nearly half of website conversions turn out to be interactions that aren’t sales leads — including incomplete form submissions and customer service inquiries — relying on the conversion numbers gives online marketers an inaccurate picture of how well their websites work.

That incomplete information can lead to serious pitfalls when the time comes to optimize lead generation websites. This is because marketers may emphasize sources that generate large numbers of conversions but not the right kind of conversions. Adding a lead tracking and validation process to the campaign, however, can help online marketers avoid this situation. By building in processes that validate and track all conversions from a website as well as tracking every phone call that comes in, marketers can know exactly how many potential customers their websites are bringing in and which sources generated them. This gives marketers more accurate information they can use when they work on optimizing their websites to maximize their return on investment.

Strengthening the Chain

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 via 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.

With these processes added to your lead generation campaign, you will gain a crucial layer of information. Your lead generation supply chain must not have any weak links to ensure your business’s continued success. With accurate, thorough lead tracking and validation, your company’s lead generation can significantly improve.

About the Author

Matt Cannon is Director of Web Services at Straight North, an Internet marketing firm 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.