Lead Generation 101: Using Analytics to Understand Your Website Traffic

Get increased and improved leads by using data intelligently.

Lead generation is the top priority for marketers right now. And rightly so. The proliferation of online content means that customers are more and more in control of the buying cycle.

Gone are the days when they had to come to you, the product or service provider, for information. Now they can educate themselves online and reach a purchasing decision without coming into contact with you at all.

Lead generation is about earning back your right to be involved in that process.

So how do you turn non-committal, anonymous web visitors into identifiable sales leads who allow you to inform and influence them?

This post will teach you how web traffic data can provide the insights you need to boost and fine-tune your lead generation strategy.

What data is available?

With the wealth of web analytics now available, marketers are better placed than ever before to gather customer information, and hone in on specific actions that will increase sales leads and sales.

The key is behavioural data.

“When prospects visit your site or download stuff from your blog page, Analytics can help you determine the causes and effects of each of the actions taken. Regular checking of page traffic and popularity can assist the business in keeping an eye on the marketplace. It’s a necessary tool especially in making sure that lead generation is easily facilitated.”

B2B Marketing

Tools like Google Analytics – easily the most popular with over 80% of market share – also allow access to crucial insights like sales conversion, product sales, and revenue data. All of these are used by switched-on marketing teams to improve their lead generation strategies.

Review, examine, and optimise

Collecting data is one thing. Making sense of it is quite another. CMOs need to ensure that they have the right resources and skill sets within the team to truly exploit the potential of the data and act on what it reveals.

For example, if you find one landing page is not performing as well as the others, why is this happening? What changes should be made to improve the interaction rates? Is it a design issue, a copy issue, a user experience issue, or a combination?

Insights need to be constantly monitored, reviewed, and compared against benchmarks and targets. They need to be interpreted and translated into actions to improve performance.

4 ways analytics tracking can boost lead generation

We’ll now look at four essential areas of insight that you can use to optimise your lead generation strategy.

1. Analysis of traffic trends

Traffic statistics reveal just how prospects are interacting with your website. Metrics of reach include pageviews and unique visits. These provide information on the popularity of certain pages versus others, and how many people are being exposed to your content.

Engagement metrics reveal how compelling or engaging your content is. Time on site, number of pages visited per session, and bounce rate all give clues as to how users are interacting with the website, and which pages need to be reconsidered or improved.

2. Understanding buyer preferences

By looking closely at social sharing trends, you can build a picture of what most interests your prospects and potential leads. Social media tracking within analytics tools allows you to see which content is performing best and getting people excited on social media.

You can then begin to tailor and target your content strategy (which is of course a crucial part of your lead generation strategy) to pull in those all-important users and get them converting.

3. Improving ROI

Web analytics tools provide the opportunity to directly link website activity with income, with ROI tools, and targets. Conversion rate tracks what proportion of web visitors opt in and become leads. By monitoring this for different landing pages, you can see which areas are earning their keep and which need improvement.

Revenue tracking allows you to see which pages and keywords are driving the most revenue, allowing for the strategy to be tailored towards driving traffic to more lucrative pages, and for content to be developed around the most fruitful keywords.

4. Monitoring devices used

The march of mobile shows no signs of abating. Even within the B2B space, you can no longer afford to ignore the importance of device-friendly user experience.

A Google/Millward Brown survey asked 3,000 B2B decision makers about their research and buying habits, revealing that mobile is crucial:

• 42% of researchers use a mobile device during the B2B buying process

• Google search queries on mobile have increased threefold

• 49% of B2B researchers who use their mobile devices for research do so while at work.

So it follows that ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is now an absolute must. If your prospects are coming up against slow load times, eye-squinting text, and poor navigation, do you expect them to fight their way through to conversion, or will they simply click away?

B2B marketers can’t afford to annoy prospects and certainly shouldn’t erect barriers to engagement. A positive mobile experience is now absolutely required to successfully interact with prospects in order to drive engagement, leads and sales.

Patricia Hursh, Search Engine Land

Caveat: Of course it may be that you are in an industry where desktop is still king, or you have insights indicating that desktop leads are more lucrative. In that case you might also focus your attention on optimising for desktop users. But the march of mobile simply cannot be ignored.

Last word: It’s all about better content…

We’ve seen how marketers now have a whole gamut of web analytics tools to help guide, shape and optimise lead generation strategy.

By drawing insights on reach, engagement, social sharing, and device usage, you can build an accurate picture of who your prospects are, what they want from you and how best to deliver it to them.

And it’s providing that truly useful, intelligent content that gets the right prospects converting into sales leads.

Takeaways:

• You can optimise lead generation by utilising web traffic data effectively
• Gathering customer information helps to better direct strategy
• Constant review of data in order to determine what works and what doesn’t is essential
• Analyse both traffic trends and buyer preferences to gain useful insights
• Optimising the experience for the device being used (often mobile now) is crucial

Learn how to make your website a lead generation engine! Download The CMO’s Guide to Lead Generation Websites