Do you agree that one of the biggest challenge the Marketers are facing today is justifying the ROI of their demand generation campaigns? The root cause is that marketers are not able to track leads conversions and leads journey throughout the sales funnel. In this blog I’m going to discuss an approach to measuring the entire lead-to-customer lifecycle, linking customers and revenue back to their original leads acquisition source.
How to Track Leads Conversion and ROI
Do you agree that one of the biggest challenge the Marketers are facing today is justifying the ROI of their demand generation campaigns? The root cause is that marketers are not able to track leads conversions and leads journey throughout the sales funnel. In this blog I’m going to discuss an approach to measuring the entire lead-to-customer lifecycle, linking customers and revenue back to their original leads acquisition source.
UTM Tracking
I can’t emphasize the importance of UTM tracking for tracking end-to-end customer lifecycle of leads. UTM tracking ensures that all the campaigns are tracked to its source & campaign name, asset type, CTAs are identified accurately. So, it’s logical that the first step in leads tracking is implementation of UTM tracking for all campaigns. Effective UTM implementation will helps to track the source of leads conversion & eventually tie it back to the revenue generated from the lead to calculate its ROI.
UTM code can help to track parameters like source, medium, campaign, ad-group, keyword, match-type, content. Here’s how a sample URL looks after UTM tracking:
http://yourwebsite.com/pricing/? utm_medium=google&utm_source=cpc&utm_campaign
=brandedkeyword&utm_
adgroup=branded&utm_keyword=abc
Let me do the job of decoding this UTM code for you: The utm_medium helps to identify that the lead came through google. CPC helps to further distinguish between organic vs paid acquisition. So, CPC basically indicates the lead was acquired from paid google campaign. Similarly, other parameters can help to find the the campaign name, keyword & type of content.
The second step is to understand where the final conversions take place i.e. lead conversions on website vs. offline lead conversions.
Marketing Conversions
For marketing or web conversions, I would first recommend to setup e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics. This will help to track value of conversions. You can assign value for each conversion.
We should setup goals in Google Analytics to track the customer journey. So, how will setting up goal tracking help you with lead tracking? Very Simply, it will help to track lead conversions for a particular source, medium or a campaign. Once a lead conversion is tracked, we can find the value of the conversion easily based on products the leads end up buying.
So, where can we see the conversions in Google Analytics? If UTM tracking is properly implemented, we will be able to track the conversions in Source/Medium section of Google Analytics. There are other ways of doing it as well. For an example, you can visit the ‘CONVERSIONS’ section and select “Goals” to identify conversions from a particular source/medium.
The AdWords/Campaigns section in Google Analytics can help you identify web visitors that came through a SEM campaign via Gclid. AdWords or Google Ads use the Gclid to talk with analytics once they are integrated.
If your company is in early stages in lifecycle of program implementations & you don’t have a data warehouse, I will suggest to export data from Google Analytics and use a free excel middleware called “Microsoft PowerQuery” to store the data. Now that we have the online leads conversions data, the next task is to stitch this data with the offline leads conversions data. This will give us a full picture of end-to-end leads flow.
SALES CONVERSIONS
Usually, the online conversions are called Marketing conversions as it comes from SEM campaigns or via organic traffic. Whereas, in offline conversions, the lead is handed-off to Sales team to further discuss the opportunity with the prospect. For offline conversions, I would first suggest to create a new field ‘Source Campaign’ in Marketo or the marketing automation tool that your organization is using.
In Sales conversions, the lead usually fills out a form or provides their email by downloading content like whitepapers or e-books. The lead information is captured in Marketo. So, now we can easily capture the name of the campaign from utm_campaign in ‘Source Campaign‘ field of Marketo. This will facilitate the lead source tracking of a known lead in Marketing automation platform.
Second step is implementation of Marketing Process Taxonomy.
Marketing Taxonomy
- Unknown Visitor: At this stage, the lead is just browsing your website as a anonymous web visitor
- Known Lead: When a lead fills out a form and we have the name & email of the lead, then it’s called a Known Lead. Any PII information can that can be used to identify a lead can be used for known lead.
- MQL: When lead engages with nurture programs & meets the lead scoring threshold then it’s MQL i.e. Marketing Qualified Lead. At this stage, the lead is handed over to Sales and a lead is created in CRM i.e. Salesforce / Microsoft Dynamics CRM or any CRM of your choice.
- TAL: If the MQL meets criteria like contactability or other data quality checks on leads information then it’s TAL or Tele Accepted Lead. At this stage, the Tele-callers have accepted to call the lead.
- TQL: Qualified by Tele-caller team as a potential buyer group then it’s TQL or Tele Qualified Lead. At this stage, the lead has expressed some kind of interest in one of the products/offerings.
- SAL: When either the Inside Sales or Field Sales has agreed upon to work on the lead then it’s moves to SAL stage or Sales Accepted Lead
- SQL: When Field/Salesrep getsa chance to have conversation with the lead and strongly feels the lead is interested in continuing the conversation further, an opportunity is created. This is SQL stage or Sales Qualified Lead.
- Won: When the SQL goes through the whole Sales Cycle like Initiate, Design, Negotiate, Presentation & Legal Approval & ultimately when the deal is sealed, it’s “WON” deal stage. At this stage, money is not received by finance but the deal is in place.
- Contract Implemented: Finally, when money is received by finance from buying group, then it’s considered as “True Win” i.e. contract implemented stage.
Just working on Lead Taxonomy is not going to ensure offline conversion tracking. A sound understanding of ER diagram of Salesforce/Microsoft Dynamics CRM is needed for effective end-to-end lead conversion tracking. It requires a connection from Marketing Automation platform to the CRM after the leads hand-off. Usually, they are linked by Account GUID or Lead GUID. Every organization has a different leads hand-off and sales process. So, we need to understand the Entity Relationship diagram for CRM to stitch the Marketo data with CRM data.
ER diagram of CRM
Once we understand ER diagram, then we can build end-to-end tracking to capture offline leads conversions. Currently, if you don’t have a data warehouse or don’t have a bandwidth to create one, I will recommend using free middleware “Microsoft PowerQuery” to export CRM data via their API.
We will also have to create a “Source Campaign” field in CRM and map it with “Source Campaign” field from Marketo to capture the leads handoff to Sales. And, based on the ER diagram, we can map the leads to opportunities & accounts.
Connect Finance data to Leads Data
Once the leads are mapped to opportunities, we can find the closed won revenue associated with that lead. Now, we have both the online & offline conversions data in “PowerQuery”. But, still one piece is missing i.e. the invoice data from finance. The closed won revenue from the opportunities is just an estimated revenue and not the actual invoiced revenue. The invoice revenue is usually stored in a SQL database. So, we will export the finance data from the SQL database and import it into Microsoft PowerQuery. PowerQuery middleware can connect to SQL directly too so we can easily import the finance revenue data in PowerQuery by connecting it with SQL database. PowerQuery can also connect to SAP/ODBC if the finance data is in ODBC enabled database or SAP.
Finally, we stitch all the data coming from online conversions & offline conversions for end-to-end leads tracking. This will ensure that we can track end-to-end journey of every single visitor/lead that converts online or offline. Then, the final step is to calculate the ROI or CPA i.e. Cost Per Acquisition. At Exact Funnel, we help our clients to track end-to-end journey tracking when we launch their digital marketing campaigns.
