Is your website set up to convert leads?
How To Power Your Lead Generation Efforts Using Basic Website Analytics & Inbound Marketing
I’m a fan of analytics. Why? ‘cause data is sexy. What makes data even sexier? When it increases your leads.
Leads are the lifeblood of most businesses. From an e-commerce site looking to boost newsletter subscriptions in order to market their products, to a law firm looking for case inquiries – the act of a potential customer reaching out for help is what drives a business.
Data-Driven Decisions
With the help of web analytics tools like Google Analytics, we can understand the various ways in which prospective customers reach our websites and the number that goes through the entire process of successful lead generation. Identifying the source from where these prospects originate and how they interact with your website can enable a business to capitalize on inbound marketing initiatives to generate a higher number of leads.
Define Your Data Drivers – What Are You Tracking Online?
The first thing to do is to define the goals of your business’ website. Tracking the unknown is impossible; defining what’s important to your business is foremost in web analytics.
So, to make optimum use of web analytics, you need to have a clear understanding of what is central to your business’s success.
These goals or objectives are fairly simple for most businesses. Below are a few examples that can guide you to define the goal KPI’s for your particular business:
- E-book Downloads
- Webinar Attendees
- Products added to a shopping cart
- Online purchases (yes, sales are leads too!)
- Newsletter subscribers
Some of these are easier to track with Google Analytics Goal Conversions than others. For example, adding a “thank you” page for your form completions is not difficult. You can then create a destination URL of the “thank you” page to track the number of form completions against your the goal you’ve created in Google Analytics.
Basically, once you’ve decided what items to track that are important to your business, you can set up those goals in analytics. You’re then ready to start studying results.
What analytics should you be looking at?
Typical conversion rate (leads to customers)
This is a vital metric for businesses, which utilize online channels for lead generation objectives. A company needs to know the number of leads that are finally getting converted into valuable customers.
Assuming that you have your visitor to lead strategy in place, then you can start to define your overall leads to customer conversion. You simply need to divide the standard monthly leads for a certain period of time by the average number of leads that went on to purchase a product. Try and do an analysis for a six to twelve month period.
Bounce Rates And Time on Site
According to the Nielsen Norman Group, most users stick around less than 59 seconds. So, if you don’t capture a user’s attention in less than a minute, you’ve lost them. It’s been dubbed “The 59 Second Rule.”
Put simply, bounce rate is when a user visits only one page on your site before heading to another site altogether (i.e. “bouncing” off your site). Anything under 40% is excellent and indicates a well-built, professionally designed site that is meeting visitors needs. On the other hand, a bounce rate that’s too low may also reflect a lack of dynamic content (blog, news, etc), which may correlate with low returning visitor percentage.
While the percentage itself is important, adding context to it can be helpful to a lead-based business.
If we segment out just visits that bounce, “time on page” becomes an important metric. This is where you start to consider “The 59 Second Rule.”
Let’s assume our business provides commercial manufacturing. A potential customer has landed on our key sales page and bounced. The amount of time they spent looking at that page can tell us a few things.
A 3-second visit is clearly not what we’re looking for. However, if the average is higher, perhaps much higher, it’s possible or even likely that those visitors have that page open as they are calling us. Since many websites prominently display phone numbers on every page, in this instance a bounce may actually be a sale.
Adopt the Sales Fly Wheel: Is your website set up to convert leads?
There are many other metrics to consider but you’ll make progress with the ones listed above. Come up with a strategy to determine what content/pages on your site are driving phone calls, sales, etc. and have a serious look at your lead generation practices. By reducing friction in the conversion process you create a customer-centric flywheel that leverages data-driven content to capture a user’s attention.
Consider what, say, five more contacts per month might do for your sales, and then remember that those five may not come from additional advertising, but rather from potential buyers already on your website.
The goal, after all, is not always more web traffic. It is obtaining more leads.
For guidance on how to optimize your site for lead generation, identify funnel gaps, and optimize your content strategy, request a digital marketing assessment of your site below.
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