Marketers have a lot to do in their day to day, plan, setup and run campaigns and then report back on results. It’s always challenging when the pressure is on to deliver ROI.
Tracking leads on a business’ website and performing lead generation analysis has always been a challenge for marketers. It is even more challenging when business needs inbound calls and marketing runs call-based campaigns.
Typically, you’ll measure your marketing campaign metrics against pre-agreed KPIs, like form leads, website visits, online appointment bookings, etc. However, these may not necessarily be the most effective lead generation metrics to focus on.
Now, we’re not saying you should avoid measuring the online journey metrics. All data is “gold” to a marketer and yes, you should measure it all if you are serious about lead generation.
BUT, what we are saying is that paying attention only to specific aspects of user activities, and considering form submissions, or clicks, as the only conversions may not be enough data for the type of goals or campaigns you’re running for service businesses that need your marketing services.
So, that leads us to the meat of this blog. How do you know what lead generation analytics are the best to measure for your marketing clients? Keep reading to find out.
Begin by mapping out the customer journey
A key part of your lead generation strategy for your clients should be mapping out every action their target audience takes before they reach the business and the specific goal for that business. More often than not you will find that prospects looking to book an appointment for a car or with a lawyer, will browse just to get educated with information but when ready, will actually look to call.
Create customer journey roadmaps for every audience segment or buyer persona. By first understanding the journey your client’s target customers take between researching options, converting, and buying, you’ll be able to develop and better target campaigns that align with their user behaviours and intent stage. Depending on the product, offer and campaign goal, you may consider displaying business phone number in the ad, or prominent CTA on your landing page.
Understand buyer intent and identify warm leads
Buyer intent data helps you identify what leads are close to converting for your marketing clients. You can leverage this data to avoid targeting audiences that aren’t showing a high interest in your clients business, advertising instead to those who show an intent to buy.
Rather than getting bogged down in all your lead generation data and paying too much attention to soft metrics such as engagement and click through rates, it’s much better for marketers and marketing agencies to hone in on the metrics that indicate warmer leads.
Those prospective customers who actually respond to ‘call now’ CTAs are higher intent leads and the answered calls that happen are a very powerful signal. You want to tap into these type of leads if you are to increase performance of marketing efforts in offline or ppc campaigns.
How to leverage the lead gen data from warm leads
With an ocean of data you could potentially tap into, how do you know what lead generation metrics signify a warm lead? It’s all about setting up campaigns such ways that monitor and track all the important buyer interactions as they search, engage with ads and before they complete actions like pick up the phone or fill in a web form.
Buyer intent data usually falls into these three categories:
Awareness: Are your leads showing signs of interest by reading your client’s blogs, downloading their resources, or following them on social media?
Consideration: Are your leads looking at specific service or pricing pages on your clients website? Maybe filling in a request for a quote form?
Conversion: Are your leads showing signs that they’re likely to convert with your client through social media DMs, calls, or abandoned carts?
When you’ve mapped out your client’s customer journeys for each audience segment, you’ll be able to see trends in the above touchpoints and assign points to each lead to measure how “warm” they are.
With that, you’ve essentially turned the interaction points into data to use and form insights. Most importantly, you can leverage the call event as signal to uncover look-a-like audiences or to feed back to Ad platforms as conversion events. These call conversions act as powerful input that further enhance the abilities of the algorithms that run for targeting.
Soft vs hard signals in your lead generation data
While lead generation is very clear in that it deals with the volume of leads generated, working through the customer journey and respective stages there are user interactions involved. In producing lead gen data, we measure those interaction. Certain user actions you measure when reporting on lead generation campaign results will be softer or harder than others.
All businesses ask marketers to bring leads, and they mean sales. Yet, depending how the business operates a marketer may only be able to influence the intent to the sale, the appointment. In many cases, that is not even possible so marketers go one step back and measure the intent to the appointment.
It’s worth looking at whether you report on leads you mean, actual appointments held, appointments booked or appointment inquiries.
Splitting each action into its respective group is very important so as to not conflate performance and also help keep you aligned to your goals.
Soft metric examples
These are metrics that are actions in the beginning of intended conversion or goal and thus show a lower level of intent. They are still very important to track because they are very telling about trends in your performance. A marketer’s lead generation analysis typically should include:
- User duration on your client’s website
- Engagement on your client’s website
- eBook form submissions
- Demo request form submissions
- Intent to call (relevant for call clicks)
Hard metric examples
These are metrics that are closely tied to the completion of conversion or goal, offering a stronger signal for your leads’ activities. Below are metrics which indicate that your leads are more likely to convert:
- Actual form submissions
- Answered calls or
- Calls with Appointment or Sale
- Booking a demo
- Scheduling a meeting
- Completing the meeting
Deciding what specific information you need to track
Your clients are all likely targeting different audiences, have diverse goals, and sell something unique, so the data you track for them to improve lead generation campaigns will be customized to their needs. So, here are some tips to figure out exactly what to measure.
#1 Know who you’re targeting
Use previous data and market research data to create ideal customer profiles and get to know your target audience on a deeper level. That way, it will be easier to identify what actions or data you need to track.
#2 Decide what you’ll use the data for
What’s the end goal for gathering specific lead data? Will this data inform future marketing campaigns, for example? Or will you use it to help your clients educate their sales teams on the best selling strategies?
#3 Identify specific data you need
It’s important that you narrow down the specific lead data you’re looking for to help you achieve your goals. For example, is your lead’s location or interests relevant to your marketing campaigns? Do you need lead email addresses or company names?
Helpful tools to gather lead generation data
Due to the sheer volume of lead generation available to marketers, it can be difficult to extract insights and know how to track them. So, here are some of the best ways to do so.
Install website analytics
You can gather data from website analytics tools, like Google Analytics to track user events, actions, and engagement on your client’s websites.
Use cookies to segment users
Using cookies, you’ll be able to identify different users on your client’s website, letting you know whether they’re new or returning users.
Track user behaviour with heatmaps
With a heatmap tool, like Hotjar, you’ll be able to measure user activity on your client’s website and how they interact with specific areas of each page.
Use a conversion attribution tool
Installing a call conversion attribution tool, like Nimbata on your website will help you better segment different audience types and understand what drives customers to pick up the phone.
How to convince your clients to base campaigns on warmer signals
Now that we’ve explained when and how to focus on warmer signals, it’s time to create campaigns that target these warm leads. But how can you convince your clients this is the way to go?
You can explain to your clients that by focusing campaigns on attracting warmer leads, they can:
Target audiences better
By focusing on warmer lead data, you’ll be able to fuel your ad platform’s algorithm with the data it needs to better target audiences who are far more ready to convert.
Save marketing budget
Collecting and measuring warm lead data lets you spend marketing budget more wisely on campaigns that actually produce results, and reduce budget on campaigns that don’t.
Generate a better ROI (and faster!)
Creating campaigns that specifically target warmer leads will help you to generate more ROI for your clients and at a faster rate, as these leads have a higher chance of converting.
Work towards meaningful goals
Rather than aiming to get your clients more clicks to their website or engagement with their social media channels, you can set goals that matter more to them, like securing more quality phone leads.
Focus on the right metrics today for higher-performing campaigns
No matter what your client’s niche, it’s important that you analyze the lead generation data that best meets their goals and their customer’s expectations.
For example, for an eCommerce client, you might be better off creating campaigns that encourage customers to buy online and measure things like “abandoned carts” and “adds to basket”.
But if your client sells luxury products or services and their customers generally get in touch before purchasing, then you need to acknowledge that your lead generation tactics and campaigns must track lead calls and buying intent signals to accurately optimise your campaigns.
If you’d like to learn how you can leverage Nimbata to improve the performance of your call-based campaigns or discuss the best marketing tactics for your clients, why not speak to our growth marketing experts here at Nimbata?
We can show you how call tracking and call conversion attribution works and talk about how you can include it in your marketing mix.
Here’s the link to a schedule a no-obligation product tour.
