Don’t spend a penny on marketing unless you are tracking website leads.
A good lead generation website will help you generate leads 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That is why a lead generation website is one of the most important assets your service business has. But regardless of how good your lead generation website is, it won’t generate as many leads as it could without lead tracking.
Lead tracking enables you to track the leads your website generates, so you can get answers to important questions such as:
These are just a few of the questions lead tracking helps you answer. The answers to these questions can help you maximize your marketing and improve your lead generation website, so you can generate even more leads.
In this post I’ll walk you through the three steps you need to take so you can start tracking your website leads quickly and accurately.
TIP: Stop asking leads and customers how they found your website/business. They don’t know. If someone tells you they found you on Google, was it a Google Ad, your Google My Business (GMB) profile, or an organic listing, that lead them to you? This is just one example. Asking people how they found your business is prone to error. Lead tracking will save you time and provide you with an accurate answer to this question.
A lead tracking app is an application that enables you to track your leads. There are lots of options available, but they are not all created equal. You need a lead tracking app that is easy to setup and use, scalable and flexible, and affordable. Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail:
There are dozens of lead tracking apps to choose from. While I’m familiar with many of them, there are two that we have used at STRADEGY.CA over the past decade - CallTrackingMetrics.com and WhatConverts.com. While both of these lead tracking apps are great, my favourite is WhatConverts.com.
WhatConverts.com does an incredibly good job at balancing features, ease of use, and price. It’s suitable for both small and large businesses. It has all the features a big business wants, with the ease of use a small business needs.
Once you have a lead tracking app, it’s time to start tracking leads. As a service business, website leads are typically generated in one of two ways - 1. Phone calls, and 2. Web forms. While there are numerous other ways leads can be generated such as chat and SMS, phone and web forms are the most common.
To track phone call leads you’ll use a feature in your lead tracking app, often referred to as call tracking. Call tracking is critical to the success of any business that relies on generating leads over the phone.
Call tracking works by registering unique phone numbers for each marketing channel you want to track. For example, if you want to track how many leads you generate from your Google Ads investment, you would register a unique phone number and label it as Google Ads. When someone clicks on one of your Google Ads and visits your website, the phone number you regularly display on your website will dynamically switch to the Google Ads phone number you setup. This all happens using a snippet of code you install on your website.
Here’s how it works. When someone clicks your Google Ad to visit your website, the snippet of code determines that the visitor is coming from a Google Ad. Because you have a unique phone number setup for Google Ads, the snippet for code changes the phone number on your website. If this website visitor decides to call you, they will call the Google Ads number you setup, which is then redirected to your regular business phone number. The visitor is connected to you seamlessly. Now you can see how many phone calls were generated through that phone number, which in this example, will tell you how many phone call leads you generated from Google Ads.
This process can be used for both online and offline marketing campaigns. A few of the more common marketing channels you may want to track phone calls from include:
Tracking web form submissions works a little differently compared to call tracking. Instead of setting up unique phone numbers for each marketing channel, you add each web form on your website to your lead tracking app.
Each web form on your website has a unique ID. This ID is used to track leads, so you know where each lead came from. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say someone clicks on one of your Google organic listings. After browsing a few web pages, they decide to submit the contact form on your website. When they submit the form, your lead tracking app captures all the relevant data including the marketing channel used to discover your website. Now you’ll be able to see how many leads each web form generates along with the data for each lead.
Tracking your leads won’t provide any value to your business unless you act on the data it provides you. At a minimum, you’ll want to review your lead data once per month.
To make this process as easy as possible, you should define a set of questions you want answers to. Here are a few valuable and actionable insights your lead tracking data can provide:
There are lots of insights your lead tracking data can provide you and your business. While the above four questions, are questions every business should be able to answer every month, there are many more questions you may want to consider. Lead tracking can provide you with the answers you need. You just need to take the time to figure out the right questions to ask.
Takeaways
There you have it, three steps to tracking your website leads. While lead tracking can be complex, it doesn’t have to be. If you are investing in marketing and advertising, make sure you have a way to track your leads. Without it, you’ll waste time and money and not even know it.
Here are a few takeaways to keep in mind:
Want an easy way to get started with lead tracking?Take a look at our fully-managed lead tracking service or Talk with an Advisor. Our Advisors can help you setup your lead tracking app and show you how to use it. It’s a fast and affordable way to implement lead tracking in your business.
Toby is the founder of STRADEGY.CA and principal Advisor. He's been helping service businesses navigate the digital economy since 1996.
Getting more leads and customers from your website is easier and more affordable than you think. Talk with an Advisor to learn how.
Toby is the founder of STRADEGY.CA and principal Advisor. He's been helping service businesses navigate the digital economy since 1996.
Discover the 6 step digital marketing strategy local service businesses are using to out-compete the competition and win new leads and customers.
Discover the 6 step digital marketing strategy local service businesses are using to out-compete the competition and win new leads and customers.