Analytics for Manufacturers Part 3: Lead Tracking

Whether you are an industrial manufacturer, distributor, B2B or B2C business, it is important to evaluate the quality of the online & offline leads your website is producing. This can be done by reviewing their context using website form analytics & phone call tracking.

Have you ever looked at your surface level lead data and felt that the lead numbers being reported didn’t match up to what your business was really feeling?

Not all Industrial Leads are Created Equally

While the above manufacturer’s Google Analytics data shows that over 300 goal completions have taken place over the last 30 days, a portion of those form completions could be spam (like the one above). Your lead quality is an important factor to consider when making decisions regarding your website strategy.

Especially for industrial companies who utilize internet marketing, phone calls can often make up a large portion of a website’s leads. We have found that for every form submission one of our industrial clients receives, they generally see 2-3 website driven phone calls.

In addition to having a better understanding of your lead quality, tracking your website’s lead data will provide you with important insights into your prospective customers’ user experience, from their initial visit all the way through to the sale. What better way to understand what users need from your website than by listening to your incoming calls or following their online activity and form submissions?

Using Analytics to Refine Your Leads & Improve Your Content

Reviewing call log and form data can help you understand what your prospective customers are requesting most often and also identify common questions they are asking that can potentially be answered on your site. When listening to your website phone calls or reviewing your form submissions, you can ask yourself:

• Are users asking simple questions your website content can easily answer? Such as the different requirements they need your products to meet or commons sizes that are sought after?
• Are users bringing up key phrase variations or industry terminology? For example, the sizes, skus, shapes or new applications that could be featured in content throughout the site?
• If they aren’t a good lead, why not? Could you add content to your site to help clear up why the caller may not have been a good fit? For example, if the caller is asking fabrication of a precision part and you only focus on large part fabrication.

Case Study: Utilizing Form Tracking to Better Refine Your Leads

When looking into the form activity of a steel service center a few days after their new website launched with Pay Per Click and SEO services, the Customer Relationship Team noticed that while users were searching for the metal sheets the client provided through their steel service center, their form submissions sometimes contained requests for specific shapes. They could also see that users were only viewing a few pages, none of which specifically stated what steel shapes the client fabricated.

The team also identified a pattern of leads with prospects requesting one or two sheets, when this business wanted to attract those in need of large quantities (shown below).

After discussing these patterns with the client, the Customer Relationship Team found learned that requests containing a service request were a better match for the client and produced a higher ROI for the sale.

Solution:

Pay Per Click Ads were updated to focus on large quantities, their service offerings and the shapes of steel that they specialized in and the team’s SEO Specialist added the more specific content to the website’s new landing pages.

Within a few weeks of launching the new website and implementing the SEO & PPC strategies gathered from their lead data, the integrated marketing program was further refined to generate the quality of leads the client was wanting.

Improving Your Sales Process

By listening to your calls, you can determine whether your team’s phone process is working well or if they may need some additional coaching. Having access to call data can give you a better sense of how your callers are being greeted and handled on the phone and can even identify new processes to help your sales team. When monitoring your website phone calls, you can ask yourself:

• Are callers getting stuck in the automated system or being put on hold for long periods of time?
• Are callers calling in before or after hours due to being in different time zones?
• What is the volume of calls asking for replacement parts versus new equipment? Is this something that could be remedied through a new form on our site dedicated to parts so the sales team is available to handle more new business leads?
• If a sales team member is out of the office, is someone else stepping in to handle their phone calls? Or are they all being sent to voicemail? (In a survey we conducted, nearly half of those asked stated that they would hang up if sent to a potential vendor’s voicemail instead of a live person.)

Case Study: The Importance of Response Time

While listening to website phone calls for a customer, the PPC Account Manager working with the account noticed that numerous callers were being told to call back at a later date. At the time of the calls, the company owner, who was out of office, was the only one who could handle quoting projects.

The five opportunities below were all looking for products this manufacturer provided. All were asked to call back later without obtaining any contact information.

Do you think people waited for the owner to return and then called back? Would you have, or would have reached out to the next manufacturer on your list? (In a recent poll, 86% of surveyed customers stated that when contacting a potential supplier, they expect a response the same day, so we expect most of these prospective customers reached out to the next manufacturer they researched.)

Conclusion

Continuously updating your website to align with your company’s goals will create a better user experience and consequently increase website driven leads. By researching what your customers are searching for and utilizing the strategies covered in our 3-Part Analytics for Manufacturers Series, you will be able to create the online experience users are looking for.

Need to get caught up? You can start with reading Part 1 of our 3-Part Series, where we highlighted the benefits of internal search tracking for manufacturers! From there, we recommend looking over Part 2 of our series where we discuss the importance of using website event tracking to better understand your target audience!

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