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Business Leads & Conversions – What’s The Difference?

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While Conversions and Leads can be the same thing, that is not always the case (nor should it be.) To simplify, let’s define each term in order to make a clear and easy distinction. Sometimes multiple Conversions occur before someone becomes an actual Lead for your business. In the case of  E-commerce, an online sale is a Conversion when it turns a User into a customer, skipping the Lead phase altogether. But, before we get too far ahead, let’s clearly define our terms:

Conversion – Action take, often online via a web page, app, or a phone call.

Lead – Person who has self-identified as someone interested in becoming a customer/client.

Identify Your Leads & Customers

For example, a User might Convert once by watching an informational video. While this action would trigger a Conversion, no identifiable information is exchanged, so the User is not yet a Lead. However, when the User later downloads a case study and provides a name and contact information, they become a Lead. Marketing pros would score this as 2 Conversions and 1 Lead. 

Generate Leads To Grow Business Revenue

The top priority for marketers is generating leads. (HubSpot, 2020)

Generate Leads Online

Revenue comes from sales, which come from customers, who were once  Leads; but how do people become Leads? That depends on what you are offering. A Lead is someone who identifies themself as interested in your products/services. How is this accomplished? Most commonly, it comes in the form of a submission or phone call. 

A phone call happens when someone is ready to have a conversation, and ideally, someone on your end is ready to have the same conversation!. A form submission, on the other hand, could happen for any number of reasons, depending on what you offer. The most basic is a simple “Contact Us!” form, but that doesn’t give the new Lead anything except the anticipation of hearing back from you. To get more form submissions, offer something to the User (whitepaper, case study, audit, etc.) to entice them to become a new Lead. 

Generating Leads – Now What?

As you collect and keep your new Lead information, your CRM will fill up nicely. Make sure you are continuing to follow-up with your new Leads by showcasing the benefits of becoming your customer.

Let DaBrian Marketing Group Fill Your CRM With Quality Leads! – Contact Us  Today!

See “Green” with Google Analytics

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Google Analytics (GA) is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales. GA can track visitors from all sources, including search engines, social networks, direct visits, and referring sites. GA offers an incredible amount of insight into your website’s visitor activity. In fact, many people who use GA don’t fully utilize all the functionality within it. Here are a few ways you can use GA to grow sales and increase return on investment (ROI).

Utilize Customer Segments

One way you can use GA to be more effective is to utilize customer segments. This will help you gain better insights on the different segments for better marketing while helping you save more money and increase your overall ROI. For example, maybe you want to see the percentage at which mobile vs. non-mobile visitors convert between the hours of 9am and 5pm. Or, maybe you want to see how organic search visitors compare to paid search visitors. It is easier to compare and contrast different groups when you can see them side-by-side.

Pay Attention to Your Mobile Users

iPhones and iPads and Droids….Oh my! As technology has continued to advance, the days of visitors strictly coming to a website via their desktop are long gone. More and more visitors today are coming from some sort of mobile device. Do you have a significant portion of visitors coming from a mobile device? If so, are they using smartphones or tablets? Do they convert as well as non-mobile users? These are just some of the questions you will be able to answer by utilizing GA. Something as simple as just adding a mobile theme can be helpful, but proactively and regularly addressing problem areas can incrementally improve conversion rates over time.

Set-Up Event Tracking

Event tracking allows you to see all kinds of interesting moments that do not end up at a thank you or confirmation page with its own URL.  For example, if you know that people who download a white paper are three times more likely to convert, you can adjust your promotions and more prominently feature your white papers on your site. Understanding what information prospects are seeking & clicking will significantly help you when it comes to optimizing the user experience.

Create and Use Custom Reports

By taking advantage of custom reporting you have the ability to create, save, and edit to get a specific view of your data. Jumping back and forth between several reports to see data that you might think would be visible within a single report can be frustrating and stressful. GA’s custom reporting can help you to alleviate some of that stress. Creating custom reports is quick and easy, and it will help you save time and money while making it easier to share with decision makers.

Determine the Source of Traffic

Determining from where and why people are coming to your site in the first place is invaluable information. Referrals may be one of the ways people are getting to your site. You could be surprised at the amount of traffic you are getting from a few websites. Search could be another way you are receiving traffic. If Search drives a significant portion of your data, keyword reports are an invaluable source of data. Campaigns are yet another way people could be arriving at your site. If you’ve been properly tagging your outbound emails, paid search efforts, etc., they will show up here. This will give you a quick place to compare all campaigns against each other. It is extremely important to identify the sources & mediums that are sending the most relevant traffic. In other words, know which prospects are converting the most.

Conclusion

GA can be an extremely useful tool when it comes to tracking your visitor activity and using the data gathered to help increase conversions. The ideas mentioned above are only a few of the ways you can benefit from utilizing GA to its full potential. There are many other ways that GA can help you to increase conversions and improve ROI.
To learn more about how GA can help you increase conversions and improve ROI, please comment below or call us at 610-743-5602.

A/B Testing (Split Testing) to Convert More Online Customers

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What is A/B testing (split testing)?

A/B testing, or split testing, is a marketing testing method by which one baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response or conversion rates. An example would be to test two different subject lines of an email campaign. A/B testing has been implemented for direct mail and within the interactive space to test tactics such as banner ads, emails, landing pages, or even entire websites to improve performance. You can also extend A/B testing to PPC advertising copy, alternative keywords, or PPC keyword match types.

How can my business or marketing department apply A/B testing?

You should always be testing ways to improve the sales process to reduce your cost per acquisition and to improve your customers’ experiences. I would recommend that you start with the “low hanging fruit” that could have the greatest impact on revenue or the customer experience. For example, an A/B test could be a simple as testing the color of the calls-to-action to improve the click-through-rate.

A/B testing can be applied to marketing tactics to improve sales or lead generation at a lower cost. In general, it’s easier to implement A/B testing with digital advertising because of the ability to make changes quickly and optimize the process. The findings from digital advertising can also be carried over to traditional advertising.

A/B Testing Best Practices

If you’re new to A/B/ split testing, here are a few best practices:

  • Define your goals. Clearly state what you hope to accomplish.

  • Determine how you plan to accomplish your goals. Keep it Simple!

  • What are you testing & why?

  • What is the variation you are testing (color, position, ad copy, etc.)?

  • Define the control and your variation for testing.

  • What are your expected results & reasoning?

  • Measure & Analyze the results through the sales or conversion process.

How do you apply A/B Testing to Internet Marketing Strategy?

You can leverage A/B testing based on geography, psychographics, customer lifecycles, etc. You want to develop realistic goals based on your target audiences. At first, I would recommend being targeted with your approach and limiting the test to a single market. It’s important to identify the greatest impact on the conversion process or sales process by modifying the internet marketing strategy slightly. Be sure to focus on all the results from the beginning of the process to completion and to communicate the results. Think about the effect the testing will have on saving time, money, and creating efficiencies.

Conclusion

If you haven’t started A/B testing, you’re wasting time, money, and missing opportunities. As marketers, we should always be testing to maximize performance and to reduce costs. Testing goes beyond just a subject line or ad copy. It requires focus, consistency, and planning. In addition, you must think about usability, branding, layouts, the purchase process, etc. There are numerous tools such as Web Optimizer, Visual Website Optimizer, or Test &Target to get started.

3 Tips to Track Conversions More Effectively

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As analysts, we are taught and bred to have an insatiable desire to track as many aspects of our websites and marketing strategies as possible. We often go out of our way to tag everything with codes and scripts so we can sniff out trends and insights. This hard work usually pays off in the form of content performance and traffic source reports.

More often than not, we like to pay close attention to the conversion report. How many newsletter subscribers did we get last quarter? Did online sales increase or decrease from last year? How many visitors from my target market downloaded an application? Conversion tracking is clearly an important element of marketing as a whole, but how do you do it effectively? Here are 3 tips to help you get the most out of your Google Analytics conversion reports:

  • Assign a Conversion Value: Conversions are usually actions visitors can take that result in some sort of revenue, be it directly or indirectly. Whether the conversion is for a completed transaction or for downloading more information, an average value should be assigned. This is paramount to demonstrating ROI for any digital marketing initiative.
  • Identify & Use Funnels: It’s great to know how many online sales transactions there were or how many new member registrations took place over the past month, but there is a great deal more that can be studied about these conversions. Conversions like these often feature several steps (a checkout process for instance: Add to Cart, Checkout, Billing Information, etc.). Specifying a conversion funnel within Google Analytics for these processes can shine a great deal of light on problem areas where visitors and leads are dropping off and leaving the conversion process.
  • Pay Attention to 2nd and 3rd Degree Touch Points: The conversion process can often pan out beyond just the first visit. In the case of an online purchase, the sales process usually spans across several sessions, as the modern consumer researches your product or service, looks for reviews, and reassurance that this will be a wise purchase. With that being said, do not ignore the first touch point that the converting visitor made with the website! If they initially discovered your site via your company’s Facebook page but completed the sale after returning to the site directly three sessions later, your social media efforts might be paying off more than you think. In the case of paid campaigns on Google AdWords or Bing Ads, the destination URLs can be tagged with “utm_nooverride=1” to ensure the first touch point gets credit for the conversion. The latest version of Google Analytics also makes analysis of multiple conversion touch points easier with its new Multi-Channel Funnel reports.

Knowing how many conversions were triggered on your website is one thing. Having a deep understanding of how much revenue was generated from those conversions, where improvements can be made in the conversion process, and which of your marketing campaigns helped drive them can save your company time and money. Most of all, however, it can help you market more effectively and efficiently to ultimately increase conversions and ROI.