Lead generation is not easy. Everyone wants to generate more leads, better leads. That is the very reason it is so difficult. While lead generation one major aspect of any marketing strategy, lead source tracking should not be neglected as well. In simple terms, the lead source is the channel where the leads are coming from and lead source tracking is the mechanism to understanding those channels.
Why you should track the Lead Source?
Napolean Bonaparte once said
“War is ninety percent information.”
If you are going for a lead gen war then you need a lot of information. Which lead source works the best, which one is leaking money. Without that information, you are just flying blind. A lot of marketers are only interested in understanding only the number of leads from various sources, which doesn’t give you the complete picture. Apart from that number, there are some other dimensions of the lead source tracking which are very important
The best lead generation source may not be the most profitable source
Let’s say you generate 1000 leads from Facebook and 300 from Google Adwords. But the lead to customer rate of AdWords is 10% as compared to 2% from Facebook. It means Google Adwords is giving you 10 customers and Facebook is giving you 20 customers. You should also track the order value to understand the quality of the audience.
A conversion source is different than the source of origin
Let’s say you have three web pages A, B, and C. A visitors discover you from page A and next day he visits your website again and checks out page C and fills out a form there. Now, what is the lead source of this lead? Is it Page A or page C.
In my opinion, the answer is both. Page A is the source of origin and page C is the source of conversion. It is important to differentiate both these conversion sources as it will tell you whether the problem lies in the discoverability of the page or the conversion on the page.
Tracking offline lead generation sources is also very important
Online lead source tracking is relatively easy. Cookies and tracking script easily can tell you that information. But how do you track the offline sources like – Banners, events, brochures?
One way to do that is to give a dedicated phone number to each of these items. The number of calls on that phone number will tell you the number of leads generated by that source.
A lot of leads comes via referral and word of mouth. These are the hardest to track. Some companies ask for that information (From where did you hear about us) in their lead generation forms and their phone calls.
In the end
At the risk of stating the obvious, whatever can be measured can be improved. If you are not tracking your lead sources in detail it is unlikely that you are going improve it. The modern-day software is very intelligent in tracking lead sources and the different aspects of lead generation. LeadSquared is one of them. Book a Demo!
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