Do you know what’s the value that your site brings to your business? How many leads is your site generating and how can you track them?
All of us, regardless of the industry we are in, would like to increase our leads. There are many different ways that you can drive traffic to your site and they all have different benefits.
You must have a way to track your online leads and conversion. There was a time when the answer was very simple: email inbox, then surfing the web and finally forcing yourself to come back and track. Today there are numerous options and ways to acquire leads. How do you know which one is best, and how do you decide which one will work best for you and your website?
If you want to sell more, you need to learn how to track your website leads.
How many leads is the site generating?
Where are the leads coming from?
Which channels bring you the most value?
Organic, Paid Channels? Social media?
The above are some of the questions that you can answer if you are able to track your leads and see the source for each lead.
Here is a short guide on how you can track your leads.
By leads I mean mainly 2 leads, phone calls, or successful form submission. Obviously, for different businesses, there are different types of leads, like live chat, email subscription, e-book download, etc. In this guide, I am covering 2 of the main leads for small to medium business, phone calls, and form submission.
Before we start the guide there are 2 tools that you need to have installed already on your website, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
Google Analytics is a web analysis tool from Google to track our visitors and Google Tag Manager is a container where you can “hold” together many tags.
You need to have some familiarity with the above tools, but even if you don’t this guide is for total newbies!
Let’s start with the easy one, form submission. If you are not an expert and you want to track if a form was submitted or not, the easiest way to track your form leads is to redirect the user to a thank you page once the form is submitted, then track that action and send the data to Google Analytics.
Ok, this sounds good. How do I redirect a form submission to a thank you page?
If you have a WordPress site, depending on the form you can do a redirection that directly from the form, or you can install a plugin that can do the redirection for you.
If it is not a WordPress site (If you don’t have a WordPress site, then I suggest getting one. WordPress CMS is probably the best CMS for small to medium businesses.)
The redirection to a thank you page is not covered in this guide, but it’s a fairly easy step to do.
So if I have managed to redirect the form submission to a thank you page, what’s next?
The next step is to create an event and send this event to google analytics. In order to create an event that essentially “fires” when someone goes to the Thank you page we will use Google Tag Manager.
In Google Tag Manager we will create a Google Analytics Event that fires every time that someone goes to the thank you page.
Our trigger essentially will be the visit to the Thank You page.
STEP 1:
Create Trigger on your Google Tag Manager:
Navigate to Triggers
Click New >> Trigger Configuration >> Select Page View >> Some Page Views
Select Page URL contains /thank-you/ (The thank you page should have this format: domainname/thank-you/
Name your triggers something easy to remember such as PV – Thank You
STEP 2:
Create the Tag for the Thank You event.
Under Tags click on New
Under Tag Configuration choose Google Analytics: Universal Analytics
Under Track Type choose Event
Under Category write Successful Form Submission or any other name that makes sense for you
Under Action, you can write Submit
You can leave all the other options empty
Under Non-Interaction Hit Choose True
On Google Analytics Settings you can out as variable the Google Analytics ID of your accounts
And for Triggering choose the trigger that we created before
In the final step make sure to publish the container.
The above process will create an event called Successful Form Submission that we can track through our Google Analytics Account.
If the above steps are too much for you or a bit unclear, there is another way to track visits to a thank you page.
You can create a destination goal under your google analytics account.
Once the goal is set up, you will be able to see all the goals under Conversions.
If you want to track phone calls, this is a bit different. We need to track any call that happens when someone sees our phone number and then give us a call. We could possibly track phone calls every time someone actually clicks on the phone number button. But we will miss many calls if we do that.
The best way is to use call tracking software and send the data to google analytics because in this way we will track all the leads under one system
For this task I suggest Callrail. It is an amazing tool that tracks your phone leads and sends you the data to google analytics.
Not only that but you can also see which number called you, how long was the conversation, how did they found you, even specify which keywords brought you the lead if it is paid search.
