You may have heard that there’s a lot of misinformation on the internet. (Surprise!)
But most people don’t expect to find online misinformation in their digital marketing performance reports.
Classic marketing reporting indexes really heavily to lead counts. Don’t get me wrong: prioritizing lead creation is better than views or clicks. But marketing campaigns that stop at the total number of form fills, chats, and phone calls can create a false impression of success.
When the whole goal of lead generation is to create sales, you need to be able to see that the leads have sales intent. Reporting only on lead volume—and optimizing to it—can create a ton of inefficiency and frustration in your sales organization.
Let’s say you find a new lead source that creates a good volume of leads at a great cost per lead. Terrific! And there’s more available. Yay! You pour budget into the lead source and hit all your lead volume goals. Victory lap!
But you know where this is going. After a month or so, you find out that the quality isn’t there. Or maybe it goes on for longer, and the sales team stops trusting the leads created by marketing. Even though 1 in 10 are good, salespeople stop following up on the leads and it’s all a complete waste.
This is the heart of the problem created by marketing reporting that stops at leads. Many marketers overcome this by tying sales back to reporting channels. That’s good. Your marketing organization will make better decisions, but you’ll always leave opportunity on the table or reduce the efficiency of your sales team.
So how do online marketers distinguish and report on leads with sales intent? The answer is to look at their behavior on your website through user-level tracking.
User-Level Tracking
To see what each of your leads did before they converted—via form, chat, or phone call—and every time they came back to the website after that, you need user-level analytics. Marketing automation, like Pardot and Marketo, or sales tools like Foureyes, allow you to do this by reporting on specific actions taken by individual leads on your website.
With user-level insights, you can use the online engagement of your leads to see if they’re really demonstrating buying intent. Take automotive, for example. VDP views can be a great way to distinguish leads with sales intent from non-sales leads, vendors, or spam.
- The average automotive lead views 1.2 VDPs
- But the average sold lead views 7.5 VDPs
The challenge is that even non-sales leads tend to look at VDPs. When there are VDPs on both sides, you can’t just say that VPD views on their own determine whether or not someone has sales intent. So how do you really understand whether you have an interested lead or casual browser?
Maybe you set up lead scoring rules once a visitor hits a certain threshold of VDP views and use that to determine when a lead can be considered sales qualified. But what if you don’t have the staff, marketing tools, and time required to implement and maintain a lead scoring system? And what if everyone shops online differently (which they do) and you can’t find an equation that consistently finds the sales qualified leads?
Lead Scoring Alternatives
When you don’t have the time and staff to continuously manage a lead scoring system, invest in an automated solution that does the lead qualifying for you. Foureyes’ user-level tracking doesn’t just record what leads do on your website and leave the analysis and reporting up to you—it integrates with your CRM to analyze and qualify leads in real-time, verifying sales leads from the rest and keeping non-sales opportunities out of your pipeline and out of your reporting. Leads that clearly demonstrate buying behavior are labeled as QSPs (qualified sales prospects).
QSPs view more VDPs than the average lead, but that’s not the only action that Foureyes monitors to filter leads. In addition to VDP views, Foureyes uses a wide range of intent data and a combination of phone tracking, machine learning, and human analysis to handle lead qualification and organization. Leads are treated individually so that any actions that may signal buying intent, from model searches and inventory filters to repeat site visits and email engagement, can be considered together. By looking at each lead on its own, Foureyes can determine whether they’re a real sales opportunity or not and you can drill down to what really matters in your reporting.
Transparent Reporting
Marketing teams using Foureyes to qualify and report on leads can integrate with Google Analytics to segment website traffic metrics based on qualified sales prospects and sold leads. The Google Analytics integration enables you to track marketing performance beyond clicks, time on site, and bounce rate. Incorporating qualified leads and sales measurement in your reporting makes it easier to collaborate with sales on pipeline performance, defend channel budgets, and share tangible marketing results.
While it may be an adjustment for companies who are used to seeing hundreds of leads per month at a seemingly low cost-per-lead, reporting on actual sales leads and providing full transparency into the number of QSPs each marketing channel is generating each month allows you to clearly see what works, what doesn’t, and what’s really impacting your bottom line.
To learn more about how Foureyes can help marketing and sales all the way from lead generation through conversion, reach out for a free demo.
