What is Lead Tracking & Validation?

Simply put, lead validation is the process of segmenting and separating sales leads from other types of internet marketing campaigns such as form conversions or phone calls. Lead validation is what shows the effectiveness of lead generation campaigns such as PPC, SEO or other types of display marketing.

Validating Activity and Lead Tracking

Validation and lead tracking are what provides marketers and business owners the ability to optimize their campaigns and improve performance to a higher level versus solely relying on reporting data. Validation and tracking initiatives should be designed to meet a key list of objectives, including:

• Optimizing campaign performance based on sales leads compared to other types of conversions
• Finding the true cost per lead
• Understanding the percentage of how many inquiries are sales leads compared to other types of conversion
• Understanding the marketing source for each validated sales lead

What Happens If You Do Not Validate Leads?

It has been estimated by research performed by Straight North that almost 50% of inquiries to a business are not true sales leads. Other inquiries can include:

• Spam submissions
• Sales solicitations
• Customer service inquiries
• Form submissions with missing or incomplete information
• Phone misdials or auto-dialers

Google Analytics is an excellent tool that is used by many marketing companies to track the effectiveness of their online marketing campaigns. However, there are some gaps when using this application to track and validate lead generation such as:

• The completed Google Analytics goals cannot be validated that it was a sales lead
• There is no qualitative analysis – just an overall count of form submissions
• Phone call data is not captured, which can account for a substantial percent of a business’s total sales leads

Why is Lead Tracking Necessary?

Without a lead tracking and validation process, assuming that almost half of your leads are something other than sales leads, two major areas of concern are:

1. Overestimation of campaign results and investment into campaigns that are incorrectly judged as contributing ROI.
2. Inability to accurately identify which campaign elements are generating sales leads as opposed to inquiries.

Bottom line is that marketers and businesses need to ensure that every dollar that has been invested in internet marketing campaigns is generating maximum value. To have complete visibility, lead validation needs to be included in your campaign management functions. At CallerReady, our pay-per-call platform provides a complete overview of each campaign and lead tracking with attribution to the marketing campaign source level as well as integrates with current business analysis tools. Contact us today to find out how your business can begin successfully tracking and validating leads.