Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

There is a company that can track your keywords/phrases whether they be from an organic search or through your current SEM. They call it SourceTrax. It will attach that data that you are looking for to the lead form when they fill out online. You can then track your keywords/phrases all the way down to the lead. The company is www.ppcmanagement.com. They've been around since SEM began.

There is nothing worse than not being able to trace your metrics all the way through to the sale.

I use a campaign management system from a company called GrowthPoint. www.growthpoint-inc.com. It's called Lead Central because the focus is on leads, but the big selling point for me was the ability to measure metrics.

We use Pivotal in-house for customer management, but I was in the same boat as you are with SalesForce. It didn't allow me to truly measure campaign success.

I could have chosen an add-on to Pivotal, but nothing I saw seemed to have what Growth Point offers e.g. campaign management, ability to easily get leads in the hands of our globally distributed salesforce, ability to track back results to the original campaign, etc.

The other big selling point for me was that Growth Point's solution is hosted. I didn't have to burden my overly burdened internal IT team with any more work.

I hope you find a solution that works for you! Good luck!

Melissa

Hi Christina,

Tracking a lead to the original click will be challenging with any analytics provider, including Hubspot (the tracking provider listed of the website listed in your profile).

The easiest method is to assign a unique ID to each email sent from your contact us page. This is easy to do in php or asp.net (one of the two scripting languages your website is built with). This unique ID can then be logged, and tracked whether that particular lead converts to a sale or not.

In order to attach the unique ID assigned when a visitor contacts you to the keyword they used to find your site, you will need to capture the keyword for each visit, and submit it with the form visitors send you from the contact page. The keyword phrase would then be associated with the unique ID generated for each contact. In time, you will be able to generate statistics on how many times a keyword phrase led to the contact page and how often it converted. In order to extract keyword phrases that users use to find your website, store it in your SQL database and generate it again when visitors submit their request, you will need some sort of tracking software that your web developers can fully modify. Free Open source tracking software like Piwik (https://piwik.org/blog/piwik-open-source-web-analytics/) will give them a fully functioning tracking solution that they can modify at will (Piwik is plugin orientated and thus can easily be modified).

Some other observations:

You say all your clicks lead to your homepage. You are missing opportunities to convert your customers to buyers. Higher conversion rates will be obtained if customers will land on designated landing pages specific to their search (e.g. if I look for services to help me with an international move, I will most likely convert to a customer when I land on a page that is clearly designated to giving info about your services for international moves).

You shouldn’t only measure how many people contact you via the form on the ‘contact us’ page, but also how many people call you as a result of a visit to your website. Make sure the number listed on your website is a unique number in order to track it. If you want to be thorough you could also list a unique designation in your offline address (by preceding it with ‘X Department’ or so. I worked as an SEO for a gift experiences company, and you’d be surprised how many companies didn’t contact us via the website but actually wrote and to a larger extend called us.)

Hope this helps and good luck!

I agree with the landing pages. This will make a big difference in results tracking. In addition, I'd recommend something like: https://officeautopilot.com/how/

They have their own DB (which will keep you from cluttering your CRM). They are planning a sync with Salesforce (you set the criteria) and you can set up campaigns/automation based on what they did. (clicked this link + filled out form X = email Y from Jennifer). They'll create pre-built reports for what ever you want to track.

What you really need to do is tie particular people back to web history, and you'll be able to get all thin info you need.