Google Analytics is a reporting suite used by sophisticated marketers to establish insights and trends on web traffic, where the audience is coming from, what they are doing, and how much conversions are costing. If tied into your digital and print advertising campaigns it can become a powerful ally to help you have a better understanding of what is going on with your marketing, particularly your website. This form of lead tracking comes under the guise of many names, click tracking, lead tracking, url tracking - whichever name you choose are all incredibly insightful methods of establishing how effective your marketing is in real time.
Why Should I Use Lead Tracking?
The most real world scenario I can conjure for you is if you want to know what your website traffic is, where it comes from, and how it's performing - odds are good that you'll want to incorporate some form of lead tracking as part of your analytics. As leads come in, it's incredibly beneficial to know the exact source. That type of agility is atypical of marketing campaigns that typically have a 30-90 day turn around time before you can measure impact.
Imagine being able to identify the source of every sale as it comes in, every customer contact, every phone call, every email. How much is that type of business intelligence worth to some?
Tracking Where Your Leads & Sales Come From
In sales, lead tracking is a must. It's imperative to not only know how much leads are costing, but where they are coming from. Sophisticated marketing campaigns utilize some form of Analytics to base assumptions on cost per lead, lead volume, conversion ratio and many other KPI's pertaining to optimizing campaigns.
Lead Tracking Tools We Recommend You Acquaint Yourself With
Analytics Helps Businesses Forecast & Make Sales & Marketing Projections
For best in class lead tracking, sophisticated reporting tools and a rich and diverse method of targeting, filtering, funneling and automating data - Google Analytics stands out head and shoulders over the competition for what they offer businesses for free.
If Google Analytics is a rocket launcher, Bit.ly is it's pocket sized little pea shooter cousin. Both provide excellent link tracking tools, however it becomes quickly apparent within the first 5 minutes of evaluating both products that while Bit.ly provides bite sized reports on link activity, Google Analytics is a 5 course banquet with all the trimmings one could want in their reporting. Definitely not a fad, or flash in the pan martech - Google Analytics is used by huge companies and has an enormous following.
Top 10 Companies Using Google Analytics Today
Twitter
General Electric
NASA
EPSON
Financial Times
Barnes & Nobles
Four Seasons
Levi's
Samsung
Virgin Media Group
Who Can Benefit From Lead Tracking?
You don't need to be a data scientist to be able to take advantage of the analytical data provided by Google, however it certainly helps to know what you are looking at as the reports can be a bit heady. The cost for implementing Analytics is nominal, but the learning curve however is not. Any sized business can deploy Analytics as part of their marketing technology suite.
Knowing how to successfully implement and make sense of the data however is another proposition in it's entirety. Deploying Google Analytics as part of your marketing efforts can take some time. Educating stakeholders, sales management staff, and marketing staff is an essential part of successfully integrating Lead Tracking components as part of the Marketing & Sales process. It can quickly become a critical component to the marketing department to make sense of what their web traffic is doing and provide handsome reporting on various marketing initiatives. Lead Tracking can also help when forecasting year over year cost per lead, trends in lead spend or lead flow, and many other indicators Sales Managers look for when assembling their projections.