27 replies to this topic

[Drew]

I can easily figure out where our leads are coming from, but determining which leads actually become sales is proving very tricky. Sometimes we'll have a client purchase the product months after the initial lead came through the website. Sometimes we'll have a client say they found us through Google, but they called instead of filling in the form on the site. It seems really hard to figure out whether the money we're spending is working for us.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to most effectively track ROI when the 'goal' on your site is just a contact form and the rest is up to a sales staff? Any useful tips on connecting the click with the sale so that we can determine not only which sites/ads are generating leads, but which ones are generating actual cash?

Thanks!

Edited by ARothman, 05 June 2007 - 03:35 PM.

[BlueSky]

IMHO, spend all your effort keeping track of conversions. Forget about leads except for the purpose of understanding how to increase the conversion rate. What I do is this:

I own a business that also has similar challenges tracking lead sources - we do not have a shopping cart. The way I go about allocating marketing dollars is to get a reasonable sense of where the leads are coming from, and the value of those leads. The only way to do this is ask the customer how they heard about you at the time of sale, and then record it.

In the case of the internet, people will often say "I found you on the internet". They don't know if they found you on Yahoo!, Google AdWords, AdSense, SERP's etc... So, what I do is use analytics to measure traffic to the site. I can then make some broad but reasonable assumptions about how effective the marketing dollars are based on % of traffic from each source, excluding direct traffic.

Also, be sure to track your customers to their original lead source and track the lifetime value of each customer. I am often surprised at how the big fishes do not look so important on the first sale, and turn out to be excellent repeat customers.

In the larger context, if I cannot reasonably prove or guesstimate that a marketing source is not producing a minimum of X dollars in revenue for each dollar spent on marketing, then I throw it out and try something else.

That's my perspective. I hope it helps.

[Matt B]

Unfortunately, the main problem is on going to be on your sales staff. They are the ones that need to keep up with leads, sales, and keeping track of their success rate. It's just smart business to know the source of the leads and which sources are the most profitable. Otherwise, how will you know where to spend your marketing budget?

The best thing is to develop a system to keep track of those leads while they are in the pipeline and start keeping a record of the value. There will always be wildcards, such as those that call from the website (some tracking systems can get around this, especially if you have call center software). But the onus is on the sales department to be able to determine the value of a lead. The value can then be determined to be different based on different lead sources: trade shows, PPC ad, organic keyword, email, snail mail, catalog, etc. Each of these need to be a part of the sales process just for the sake of a clear ROI.

I hope that helps!

[Drew]

Thanks guys - I think maybe I need to have the sales team start doing something different when they get a website generated lead. Right now I'm doing lots of searching of email accounts to figure out whether the new customers this month came in from the website or not and when. The person who buys today may have first contacted us months ago, so drawing the lines from Google Ad to actual purchase is really tough, but maybe if I can create some new processes I can at least begin to track it.

All I know is that with the kind of web advertising cash we're dropping, simply making guesses about which ads are actually generating revenue just isn't going to cut it. If Google Adwords is bringing in 20 leads a week and none of them actually purchase the software, then we shouldn't be spending so much on it. Right now, I can tell where the majority of the leads come from, but have no clue whether they're actually worth what we're paying.

[Randy]

A question for you ARothman.

When people purchase are they given any type of unique identifier --such as a username-- that they need to use in order to get to the goodies? This is of course assuming they end up doing something on your web site, like downloading software after purchase.

If so, there's a potential way you may be able to tie it all back together reasonably effectively. The idea goes sort of like this:

• When a brand new visitor first arrives at your site request to set a permanent cookie on their computer. This cookie can contain whatever data you need it to. Time/Date stamp, the referrer string (assuming they have one) of how they found your site, etc. Be careful never to overwrite this cookie with other pages or subsequent visits to your site.
• Then after they've purchased if they're required to log in or use some sort of unique identifier you gather this, which you should also tie back to how the purchase was completed. When they log in query their computer for the cookie you already set with their initial visit to grab the information it contains.
• Drop the cookie info and their username/unique identify into a database of some sort, which you can then review to tell which sales came from which leads and hopefully how the sale was ultimately accomplished.

Does that help?

[Drew]

Basically the process is that someone comes to the site, reads up about our products, and then fills out a contact form. Then one of our sales people calls them, gives them info, and hopefully schedules a product demo. If they like it, they buy. The visitor might never come back to the site again after they fill out the form - they don't need to visit our website to use the product - so all of the post-lead tracking is basically up to the sales staff. They mark down where the lead came from and what date it came in on. The problem I'm having is in sorting through 5000 leads to find the one that just bought and then go into Analytics to try and trace the lead back to the starting point based on the date/time. It's very tedious and not all that effective.

[Randy]

ewww! Yeah, I wouldn't want to take on that project either, and I'm one of those tracking fanatics!

It's probably going to come down to training the sales staff. My hunch is you're still going to struggle getting it all to trace back properly, but if you can at least get a higher ratio of good data you may be able to make better advertising decisions, albeit based upon incomplete data.

[torka]

My day job company uses a customer relationship management (CRM) software system that would make your job a lot easier, I think. Unfortunately, it's very high end (over $100K just for the software, nevermind the beaucoup bucks we had to pay to the consultants to help us get it all set up), so I wouldn't dream of recommending this specific piece of software to a small business.

However, something using the same general concept might be useful. See, whenever a customer contacts us or we contact a customer — e-mail, phone, direct mail, whatever — that contact gets recorded in that customer's account in our CRM system database.

Any time we get a contact from a customer, we use search functionality built in to this software to see if that customer has contacted us before, so we can add the new contact to the correct existing customer record (or set up a new record, whichever is appropriate). I think generally we try to key on the customer's main phone number, but we can do partial-text searches on the company name or most any other field, so we can still do our best to match in the event we don't have a phone number associated with a given contact.

Sometimes (say, when we send out a direct mail piece), the information is automatically recorded — that is, we use the CRM system itself to select the customers to whom the mail piece will go, and the CRM system automatically records they've been selected and the piece has been mailed. Sometimes the information is "semi-automated" — when customers register their product warranty over the web, that goes into a database, which is once a week uploaded, matched and merged with the CRM system database. And sometimes it's manual — when the customer calls to talk with our direct sales staff, the person they spoke with will record the call details "by hand" in the system.

Over time, we've built up quite a lot of contact info on some of our customers. We record if we send them a direct mail piece, if they call or e-mail a sales inquiry, if they register a product warranty, if they request technical support, if we call them with post-sales follow up, when they buy replacement supplies or accessories for their product, if they upgrade to a new product, if they just call to chat. You name it, whether it was initiated by us or them, no matter what form it takes, if it's an interaction between us and a customer, it gets recorded in our CRM system.

We can specify what kind of contact it was, how it came in to us (or how we sent it out) and what the results were. And we can define various filters and run canned or custom reports so we can see (for instance) how many people who returned a direct mail response card eventually bought a product (and which product they bought). It's not foolproof by any means, but we're getting a lot better feel for what's going on out there than we used to before we installed this system.

If you can find or develop a CRM system into which you can feed your customer contacts (landing page forms filled in, phone calls received, etc.), integrate with existing automated systems and motivate/train your customer-facing employees to use this system to record all their human-generated customer contacts, you could then have a pretty good idea of which initial contact sources are bringing you the sales, how many contacts on average you need per customer to close the sale and how long your sales cycle is (and if there are differences among the different lead-gen channels).

Whether this is practical, and how sophisticated and automated such a system would need to be would depend on the volume of leads and sales you're talking about. If you're generating 20 leads a month, that's one thing. Twenty a day might be something else, and 200 a day would be another beast entirely.

Unfortunately, I don't know if there are any affordable, user-friendly off-the-shelf solutions that will do this sort of thing. If you've got six figures to drop there are any number of "enterprise-class" CRM systems that would probably do the trick (and if that's in your budget, PM me and I'll tell you which ones we looked at). However, not too many "regular" businesses have that kind of cash to toss around. Perhaps there are others here who have some ideas?

But FWIW it seems to me that if such an animal exists and can be found (or if it doesn't exist but can be developed without costing an arm and a leg), it would get you most of the way to where you want to be.

--Torka

[Ignoramus]

There isn't a totally satisfactory answer.

If you are using a form for customer leads you could try adding a field which says something like..

'How did you learn about us ?'

Don't make it mandatory.

Use a drop down button with options - Google, Yahoo etc.

Don't leave a blank form field for people to complete - as BlueSky says, you will get a lot of 'on the internet' responses which ain't helpful.

Assuming your salespeople have a contact sheet get them to ask the same question unless the potential customer has already completed the form field. I'd leave it 'till the last question.

It's not a great solution but some data is better than no data.

[Drew]

Maybe some more specifics might help pin down a solution.

Here's the contact form on our site -- www.pcrecruiter.com/products_contact.htm

Now, when someone hits that form, I get an email with all the info. That email gets passed to the sales dept where one of the sales team enters the info into our database along with the lead source and the date.

At the moment, that's where it ends. I can look at Google Analytics and look at my lead emails and figure out which person came from where based on the time of the conversion. What I'd like to do is somehow track that all the way to the sale. The problem is that the sale may come many months after the initial contact, and going back to find the original source of the contact is rough.

I was just wondering if others had tackled the same issue and found any good processes for handling it.

[Randy]

Can you tie it back together at the end of the sales process by their name? Or maybe even their email address or phone number? I'm thinking the name would be best unless you're getting a lot of corporate orders or something. But even then using the email address or phone might lead you back to the Best Possible candidate.

I'm thinking a little system where the sales person can search the database for the customer name and assuming it's found entering an order number/invoice number that can then tie the sale back to the original contact. Or of course you could make it a part of an overall CRM system with some features like Torka described above.

[BlueSky]

Contining the recommendations from everyone else: It is important to understand that, although it would be ideal, you do not need to track everything. Especially in your case, where it is near impossible.

If your approach is changed to get a smaller sample of very accurate stats (perhaps 10% of all sales would be enough), I think you can get good information without having to burn time tracking down the other 90% of data.

[KCrenshaw]

Hi,

I noticed your question, and I've had great success using a web based CRM solution to take care of exactly what you are describing. I know that Salesforce.com and Netsuite.com have both introduced solutions that help you track leads generated fom search all the way to closure.

I hope that helps!

[lorio]

Hi all. Glad I read through to the bottom. I have almost the same issue on a daily basis. Our company manufactures large systems, so some leads can take years to become orders. Over time, web leads have improved and we MUST prove ROI. Not only ROI, but we've had to try to convince the company that we really should have a website, and that it IS a valid sales tool.

What we do is two-fold. I receive all leads that use the "Contact Us" form on our website. It captures name, company, address, etc. and asks for some specific items the customer is interested in. I acknowledge all those inquiries with a copy to the regional salesperson. (and by the way, customers really appreciate the acknowledgement - it let's them know that someone is listening, gives them a point of contact within your company in case the salesperson 'doesn't' call, and I'm always amazed at how many emails I get back thanking me for doing it!) I record all leads in a CRM (a smaller scale from that mentioned above since I'm the only one that uses this particular one) as "notes" just to have them on record. You could do the same in Word document or something. I also record all leads in an Excel spreadsheet, where the cells are the fields completed on the contact form.

Our company's sales group actually uses SalesForce.com for tracking projects/opportunities. Cost (I believe) is roughly $50/month for each user. Once a week, or a few times a month, I pop into SalesForce and check the new projects/opportunities added against the entries in my spreadsheet. It makes "searching" easy, and after a while working in the spreadsheet, you start to remember what's there! We have a field in SalesForce called "Lead origin" but most sales people never indicate anything other than "direct". Because I already know the customer name, or territory, or whatever, I can check that against the new projects/opportunities added in a given time frame, and update the "Lead origin" to "website" (or "internet" - whatever you set up) in SalesForce. I also add some fields to my spreadsheet as a back-up tracker.

Admittedly, this system is a bit tedious, but we have been able to continue tracking activity over a period of a few years. I don't mind that an inquiry generated in 2003 became an order in 2007 - the fact is, both still work towards proving ROI ... I can show that our website generated $XXX in leads (opportunities) in a certain year, and also $XXX in orders. Let's face it - we can't win every order, but by proving that $XXX of opportunities are generated through our website, the onus is then on the sales team to close more of them. (or on me to drive more relevant inquiries!) And hey, maybe ... just maybe ... if we invested more into our site, we'd generate and close more!

On a side note, I also do the same with "other" internet inquiries. If someone calls and says "I saw on your website that ..." or emails us through a directory listing or whatever, I add that to my reports with a field indicating "Source". This is obviously pretty incomplete since I can only add the ones I hear about, but heh - even getting 1-2 inquiries a year through an online directory tells me whether I want to keep paying to be in it, depending whether the leads are good or not.

One of the biggest problems I've run into is getting our sales people to take our website leads seriously, and to understand why we track these leads. It's been an uphill battle with them, but luckily, after tracking this way for the last few years, I have been able to convince management (who want that ROI) of how valid a tool our website is, and that we must capitalize on that.

Hope this helps!

[Eschtruth Harrison]

Wow, this is great information but for a small business it doesn't need to be so complicated. A spreadsheet would do the trick for tracking a modest number of leads/sales. When someone calls in and says they heard about you from the web or fills in a contacts form online you add them to the spreadsheet as a "web lead" with the original date. When a sale is made the salesperson searches the spreadsheet for the name or phone number of the lead and adds the amount of the sale and date. You could keep adding columns for each subsequent sale like sale1$amount, sale2$amount, etc. to track repeat business.

If you really needed to record the actual PPC ad the person came from you could do that with cookies. Just have a tracking paramenter at the end of the URL like ?source=google&ad=ppc1 which is recorded as part of the referrer string in the cookie. Then when they fill out the online form to request more info grab the referrer from the cookie & append it to the email that is sent to you. Record that in the spreadsheet as an additional column and off you go. Of course if they call in (instead of filling out the form) they would just be a generic web lead without a specific referrer.