Having a comprehensive lead generation strategy is key to guaranteeing business growth. Many business owners and sales teams don’t know how to track leads or assume that it’s a rather complicated task with minimal returns. Tracking leads is not about the numbers, but also the experiences and the issues their potential customers are facing in their buying journey.
But where do you start? What are the best strategies to track marketing success? In this article, we’ll share seven of the best ways for marketing lead tracking. We recommend using a combination of these strategies with your marketing campaigns and sales processes.
What is Lead Tracking?
Let’s first get the definition clear on what is Lead Tracking. Lead tracking is the process followed by marketers to track their leads through the complete customer journey. This starts from the lead’s initial touchpoint to them converting into a customer and generating revenue for the business.
Why is tracking lead generation campaigns important? The simple answer is this: it will give you a better understanding of the impact your marketing activities are having in driving new leads. You will also understand the kind of impact these campaigns are having on pipeline generation. Tracking leads will allow you to improve your sales funnel, leading to quicker sales in the future.
Marketers have relied on tracking leads post-conversion. Thanks to sales automation and big data analytics, businesses can now get a complete view of what their lead was engaging with before the conversion and how their journey has looked, from start to finish. Understanding all the touchpoints in a consumer’s journey is vital in making more informed business decisions and marketing campaigns backed by data.
Challenges in Monitoring the Conversion of Marketing Leads
Even though businesses usually have the lead data, it’s disconnected and disorganized. Monitoring the conversion of marketing leads involves understanding all the steps a lead takes from the very first website session to conversion. Tracking these steps is challenging because you have different apps for different touch points but they’re not integrated. Depending on your business, you’ll likely get conversions from a variety of channels. These can include emails, social media, search engines, paid campaigns, phone calls, form fills, live chat, and more. All this makes tracking leads, lead volume and lead quality a bit of a complicated task.
If you’re tracking your marketing data from Google Analytics, you’ll still not have the full visibility of your marketing leads. Keep in mind that every customer goes through a process – the buyer’s journey. This includes the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. There could be multiple touchpoints within each of these stages, leaving you with a mountain of data but no actionable insights.
This is where lead tracking helps give your busy marketing and sales teams and the management insights into your customer acquisition, tracking how and where new customers are won and lost. You will be able to optimize your campaigns and remove any roadblocks.
So, are you ready to learn about the best strategies to track leads?
7 Best Ways to Track Marketing Leads
For a solid lead-tracking strategy, you should consider the following:
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Make Use of CRM
While Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets can work for your sales team, there is a risk of leads slipping through the net. Having good CRM software like Salesforce, Hubspot or Pipedrive will allow you to store lead information with ease and make all this information available for any team member. Because of the visibility of previous interactions, your teams will be able to follow up promptly and with personalization.
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Implement UTM Parameters
Setting up goals in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager will let you monitor key actions on your website like form fills and phone calls. However, this data will be limited as you won’t be able to get a breakdown by channels or campaigns. To get that level of information, you will need to implement UTM parameters as part of your lead-tracking strategy. UTM parameters are arrangements of code that you add to your URL that allows you to track the performance of a specific channel or campaign, directly within Google Analytics.
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Connect Google Analytics With CRM
CRMs and Google Analytics specialize in gathering different types of data. CRMs provide stronger insights into things like traffic sources, page performance, lead conversion rate, customer lifetime value, and engagement metrics. GA4 is perfect for analyzing user engagement, event tracking, audience building, and real-time reporting. Combine the two and you have a multi-layered analytics framework that offers a 360 view of your audience. Integrating your CRM with Google Analytics will give you a better understanding of your customer behavior, target audience, and overall performance. You will also be able to track offline metrics, including lead quality and order returns. See how GA Connector can help you integrate Google Analytics with a CRM like Salesforce.
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Set Up Marketing and Sales Dashboards
Dashboards are visual representations of real-time data. Setting up sales and marketing dashboards can help you get access to your organization’s key performance indicators, making them easy to read, analyze, and make decisions on. Dashboards are essential to tracking your marketing success as they allow employees and managers to check on the progress toward marketing objectives and sales goals. Having a quick snapshot of the performance of your campaigns will save you time that would have been wasted looking for these KPIs in GA4 or your CRM. Sales and marketing dashboards are customizable. Depending on your needs, you can create multiple versions.
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Asking Leads Directly
One obvious way you could track your marketing leads is by asking them directly. These ‘how did you hear about us’ forms are common. While they might not be completely accurate and often ignored by users, they can give you an understanding of which touchpoint was the most memorable for the lead in making the decision. Solely relying on the answers will skew up your ROAS. Our advice is to look at this data about other marketing attributions that you have in place. A good place to embed these questions is within a lead form, rather than after someone submits the form.
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Use Promocodes
Promocodes are very effective in tracking leads and the success of your marketing campaigns. You can use promo codes for a variety of purposes, including new customers, repeat customers, sales, and offers as well as referrals. Using different promo codes for different marketing channels will allow you to track their effectiveness. You can also have promo codes for regions and physical shops. This will allow you to get visibility on the number and quality of leads generated by regions and shops.
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Set Up Call Tracking
Who says calls are an outdated means to reach out to customers? With call tracking systems, you can connect to the customer journey via a phone call, providing you with insights before having a conversation with the customer. Most modern CRMs will provide you with a complete view of all interactions that have occurred with the customer in the past, so you can ‘pick up’ where you left off. This real-time intel is valuable for sales agents as they can then tailor the phone call experience. Tacking phone calls will give insights into which marketing activities are resulting in customers picking up the phone.
Benefits of Tracking Leads
Tracking leads is an important component of the lead management process. Once a lead is generated and you have captured their information, you will need to have a lead tracking system that will organize and update the lead’s data as they go through the sales journey. Here are some of the key benefits of tracking leads:
Organization of Data
A centralized lead tracking system that stores key information like names, company info, phone numbers, email, and addresses of the leads makes it easy to find information when you need it. This adds to the efficiency of your sales and marketing strategies, hence impacting the ROAS.
Better Campaign Planning
You want to know the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. When you are tracking leads through a CRM, you can see how they are interacting with your brand. This will keep you updated on when and how you last engaged with them – allowing you to better plan your upcoming marketing and outreach campaigns.
Improved Pipeline Health and Accountability
Lead tracking lets you view the individual pipeline stage status as well as evaluate the conversion rates within each pipeline. You will have visibility on how effective your sales teams are at closing deals. Tracking leads and assigning them to someone within your team (for example, a sales rep) ensures more accountability in case an opportunity is lost. Businesses can understand which products and services are selling well and zero in on any opportunities that need more nurturing.
Creation of Marketing Segments
When you are tracking sales leads, you are storing contextual information about them, such as their job titles, common behaviors, and product needs. This information is essential in creating new marketing segments, allowing you to sell to these new segments in a certain way and launch specific marketing campaigns.
How Leads Tracking Helps To Save 7 Figures Sum (Real-World Example)
GA Connector has helped businesses revolutionize their lead-tracking strategies, resulting in increased sales efficiency, better-targeted marketing campaigns, improved lead nurturing, and cost savings. We recently enhanced the marketing strategies and decision-making processes of NetReputation, America’s largest online reputation management company.
NetReputation had the challenge of tracking their lead sources, understanding the traffic origins, and analyzing the performance of keywords. With GA Connector, they were able to get detailed lead source tracking, providing them with a full view of the lead origins. The added insights allowed them to make strategic marketing adjustments that resulted in reduced marketing costs and better ROAS. NetReputation was also able to manage leads across different digital platforms and utilized our UTM tracking capabilities to further optimize their spending on partnerships and paid listings.
The insights from GA Connector enabled NetReputation to evaluate the quality of their leads and the impact that this was having on their sales strategies. This resulted in savings of millions of dollars for the business. Read the full case study here.
Sum Up
There you have it – the seven best ways to track your leads for maximizing your sales and marketing success. Our advice is to implement as many of these strategies as part of your marketing tracking. This will give you a holistic and granular view of the health of your marketing activities. You want complete visibility and control over your sales and marketing processes and the last thing you should be worrying about is losing leads because they weren’t tracked properly.
Get in touch with us to find out how GA Connector can help you propel your business growth and why we’re the best tool for tracking leads.
