During my brief stint in Sales, I became directly familiar with a problem in measuring lead-generation campaigns. We were usually happy when Marketing generated lots of leads for us, but sometimes the leads were terribly unqualified. Culling through such poor leads wasted our time and kept us from following up adequately with the good ones.

Lead generation sites present a special Web analytics challenge: You can see which keywords and campaigns produce leads, but how do you determine which of those leads actually become customers? For companies with more than one step in their sales cycle, the sales process is often tracked in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Unfortunately, because that CRM software is separate from your Web site, it is not directly visible to ClickTracks. However, there's a relatively simple, low-tech method to tie these two systems together. Here's how it works:

1) Pass the ClickTracks persistent cookie value into your CRM system.

In order to track unique visitors, the ClickTracks javascript code saves a cookie on each visitor's browser with a unique value. Visit your own site, view your cookies and look for one that is called something like "Persistent_id_xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" - with the x's replaced by a unique code for your site. Add a custom field to your CRM system and name it something like "WebCookie". Then add a hidden field to the form on your Web site that adds leads to the CRM system. Your Web site will need to read the ClickTracks persistent cookie and insert its value into this form field. When a visitor submits the form, their cookie value should appear in the WebCookie field in your CRM system.

2) Create a report in your CRM system to find the desired leads or customers.

Configure your CRM system to display the additional data you've been collecting. For example, you might create a report that shows deals with a monetary value of greater than $10K that closed last month. Make sure the WebCookie field is in the report and copy the list to your clipboard. You might need to paste this list into Notepad and remove extraneous characters so you're left with just a list of cookie values in a column.

3) Create a segment in ClickTracks for this criterion.

Create an advanced segment based on "visitors who had a certain cookie value". Select your persistent cookie from the list, and then choose "any of the following values". Paste your list of cookie values and complete the label wizard.

The result will be a segment in ClickTracks that represents criteria from your CRM system that was otherwise not possible with Web analytics alone.

Of course, you'll need to keep your typical sales cycle in mind when viewing data in ClickTracks. For example, deals that closed this month might have first found your site a month or two earlier. You'll want to be sure your dates in ClickTracks cover that expected timeframe. And that's it! With just a little bit of persistence, you'll be benefiting from all the data you can get your hands on.

For help or more info on this process, please contact me via our “Contact Us” form, or submit your comment below.

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