The combination of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Pay Per Click advertising has made online marketing one of the most effective ways for small and medium-sized business to build a brand and generate new sales leads.

Increasingly, online marketers use Google Analytics to track their performance. Google Analytics gives you great insight into your websites traffic volumes and the sources of that traffic, but it does not help you understand if that traffic converts into real business.

If you advertise using Google Adwords or the Bing equivalent, you are able to gain slightly better insight.  These tools allow you to track something called conversions.  Conversions are tracked by putting some specific web code on a ‘check-out’ page or on a ‘thank-you’ page once a lead capture form has been completed. If you actually sell your products online, then conversion tracking is very effective because you can track real sales.  However if you don’t sell online, then all a conversion tells you is that someone completed a form on your website. You still don’t know if it is a quality lead, or if the visitor ultimately becomes a new customer. By using Workbooks you can move beyond Google Analytics to answer key business questions, including:

• Which sources of online marketing deliver quality leads?
• Which online marketing activities result in sales?
• How much does it cost me to deliver quality leads to the business?
• How many sales do I make from a specific online campaign?
• How is my overall return on investment? (i.e. for every pound spent on a campaign, what value of new orders do I receive?)

Tracking sources of new leads

Let's start by looking at the typical lead capture process:

The diagram above illustrates the four main routes via which visitors can find your website:

• Organic search engine results (not Adwords advertising)
• Online advertising such as Google Adwords or banner adverts
• Referring sites - other websites that have links to your site
• Direct traffic, where the user enters your website address directly into their browser

Once the visitor has reached your site, then a typical ‘call to action’ is to ask them to complete an online form.  Often the visitor is encouraged to complete the form, through the offering of something in exchange, such as a free trial or access to a white paper.

First visit & last visit

It is worth remembering that a new visitor isn’t always going to complete a form on their first visit.  They may look around your site, before visiting a few minutes or days later.

In many cases the visitor will revisit the site using a different method.  For example they might discover your site for the first time via Adwords and remember your company name.  They may next visit several days later, having searched for your company name and arrived via search results.

Understanding this concept is important for measuring Marketing ROI.  For example, if you want to measure the return on your Google Adwords spend, you really need to be tracking how they first found your website.

Google Analytics & visit tracking

Google Analytics provides free tracking code which is placed on every page of your website.  This code is used to send visitor data back to the Google Analytics engine and drives the reports you find inside the Google Analytics  portal.  Part of that code creates a specific cookie in the visitors’ browser which stores information about how the visitor found your site.  The cookie is called ‘_utmz cookie’ and normally stores the following variables:

Google Analytics resets these values stored in the visitors’ browser each time they revisit the site via search, advertising, or referral.  If the visitor arrives directly, the _umtz cookie is not set. If you want to track first visit and last visit information, it is necessary to copy the values contained inside the _utmz cookie into a second cookie.  This can easily be achieved with some basic HTML code on your website. You can then use the values contained in the _utmz cookie to identify last visit, and the value stored in the second cookie to identify the initial visit.

Google Analytics & Workbooks CRM

By using the Web2lead functionality of Workbooks you can capture leads from a website and, at the same time, capture the values contained inside the tracking cookie. Web2lead functionality is something which is provided by the Workbooks CRM application and is available to all Workbooks customers.  It allows a web form to be created in Workbooks and hosted on your website.   It uses standard HTML form functionality and calls a specific action on the Workbooks site which allows you to post the form including various hidden fields. The action of posting a form creates a Sales Lead inside Workbooks which contains the displayed and hidden fields from the web form.  You can see a typical web2lead form here. If you look at the source code of that form you will see that, alongside capturing the ‘displayed’ fields it also interrogates the _utmz cookie to extract the visitor source information.  The information contained in the Google cookie is then passed into Workbooks and added into custom fields created on the Lead record. The form is also able to associate the lead to a specific campaign.  In this example the form links the lead to a marketing campaign based on the following logic: If the utmz SOURCE is ‘google’ and the umtz MEDIUM is ‘organic’ – The campaign is set to ‘SEO Marketing’ If the utmz SOURCE is ‘google’ and the umtz MEDIUM is ‘cpc’ – the campaign is set to ‘Google Adwords’ By associating leads with campaigns and in turn allocating budgets to campaigns it is possible to measure the cost of a lead, as well as track which campaigns deliver the most effective results. As the lead passes through its life cycle:

• Unqualified Lead > Opportunitity
• Opprtunity > Order
• Order > Invoice

It is possible to track the original website visitor information across the entire life cycle.  So at a very simple level you can track which web marketing activity generates real sales opportunities, all the way through to which ones deliver real business.