Your website is doing great--it's getting traffic, and people are engaging with your content. Paying attention to who those people are, and learning about where they're coming from is important for your investment. Tracking leads and using lead tracking software is crucial to deciphering between good and bad data. Today's video talks about what you need to do to get the most out of the leads visiting your website.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to our video today on tracking leads. I'm Chad Hill, and I have Adam Stetzer with me.
Yeah, good afternoon, Chad. There's a lot of emphasis on lead tracking when you get into search engine optimization or you're doing pay per click management. Today we want to turn our attention a little bit to the other end of the sales funnel, which is actually tracking the actual leads and conversions. It doesn't get nearly as much attention, but I think as people move more into SEO and PPC they start to realize what I know I was told very early on but really took several years to really sink in, which is that not all traffic is created equally. And it really gets down to that traffic which converts.
And now you're talking about that lead and what you do with it, how you move it through your website, how you build analytics around it. So let's dive into lead tracking for our viewers today. We're going to outline what's important and how you should be tracking leads on your website.
That's a great question. And I think it is like you said, a progression. Because tracking leads always starts with first just getting that information off your website. And a lot of times people start with essentially creating a basic web form that might have name, address, phone number, and then that information is emailed onto a list of people.
The problem with that approach is that often times leads get lost in email, so people start to look for something a little bit better. And the thing that's better would be to then actually start taking those leads and put them into a lead tracking software, into a database. And that lead tracking software then is able to not have your leads getting routed through email with the potential of them getting routed into spam folders, but rather stored in a database which then can notify people that it's lead tracking.
Right. So your first point there is that people are probably a little overconfident in their ability to track the calls coming in. They think, oh, yeah, I get all these sales calls and I close them. I'm great, I don't lose anything. And we know the reality's different. People are not that organized. And with such an emphasis on bringing traffic to the website and so much work on the marketing on the top of the funnel, it's really important to then be organized with lead tracking. So I hear you, and I'm a big database proponent. Track all data and make sure that gets into something where you absolutely know every lead that came and you can see where it is in any step of the process.
Exactly. And then once you have that, the next thing that happens inevitably is people start to look at their leads saying, well, I have 10 leads here. But I need to know, where do these leads come from? Because some are better than others. And so really where that leads you is that, once you have them in the database and you get to start to see a trend of how many leads you have and who the actual people are, you want to know, where do the leads come from? That requires a little bit more sophistication in your lead tracking approach.
What that means is that now your lead form on your website needs to be able to grab invisible information. So if someone types in their name, address, and phone number, what you want your web lead form to be able to do is actually grab things like where are they coming from, and how did they get to your website? Because that information can then be saved in what are called hidden fields and submitted right along with the rest of the contact information. So that now, when you go back and talk to that person, over time you can go back and say, well, the ones who actually turned into real customers, where did they come from compared to the ones that didn't turn into customers? And is there any trend of how I can optimize marketing spend to only target those that are more likely to become customers?
All right. So again, all traffic is not created equal. And it's really interesting, Chad, it's almost like we can see this progression happen over and over again. When you're first into online marketing, you're just poking your head into PPC and SEO. It's just get my website noticed, get it found, give me some traffic. No one's here, it's dead, right? So they just want any traffic. But then it quickly turns after time and some investment. Well, I don't just want any traffic, I want traffic that converts and turns into business, which is the next progression. And then where you went is even a further refinement. And it's very important.
It's like, OK, now I have traffic converting, but I've got this budget on the one hand that I'm spending on SEO. I've got another big budget I'm spending on PPC. Maybe I'm doing a social media campaign, doing email marketing. I need to know, is my cost per lead-- which might be $40 a lead from PPC-- is it $80 a lead from email marketing, and I need to figure out how to bring that down? Or I've got an excellent deal on PPC. And I think that level of analytics and marketing intelligence is what you're articulating as where you need to end up with lead tracking software. Which, if you don't track that data all the way through, use a database, have these tracking fields, you just can't have, right?
Exactly. And I think that when you, again-- You start with tracking leads, just getting that information together. But as you build on it and start to understand the power of optimizing your marketing campaigns, you realize you need these tools. And that's why at Semify we've been working, really, from day one on building in these capabilities so that not only can we help you drive traffic to your website through a number of different mediums, but we can also then help you measure the results and measure the return on investment.
So when you're looking to start tracking leads and looking to take it from a level beyond just what you're getting in email, look to a tool like Semify that not only is able to track that information in a database and show you over time, but is able to capture this hidden information about where the customer's from, so that you can actually get very precise information on the cost per new customer, regardless of the source it's coming from.