Lead Analytics Info

The Things Web Analytics Teach You

2009-04-10T11:06:00.000-07:00

We have already talked about web analytics a lot of times. We have also covered a number of programs that can be useful for this process. You may assume then that the information that you are going to receive will be dependent on the application that you are using. For instance, if you are a Google Analytics fanatic, the data that you are going to receive include where the traffic is coming from, how they arrive at your website, how long they have stayed, and what pages they are viewing.

However, you can summarize all the messages of your web analytics programs into three things.

• They tell you about your website design and content,

• the marketing campaigns you have launched,

• and the behavior of your prospects.

What about your marketing campaigns?

A web analytics program can tell you how your marketing strategies are doing. Let us use an illustration: Let us suppose that you are using a PPC campaign to promote your website. With Google Analytics installed in your website, you can then determine which of the clicks came from your PPC. You can then evaluate, depending on how many and value of the clicks you receive, if your PPC campaign is helping you in marketing your websites. Are you getting the right traffic into your website? Will your conversion give you good returns to your PPC investment?

Web analytics then can tell you which of the techniques that you have are working or not. Then, you can make the necessary changes to improve your poor-performing strategies. You can determine if the keywords you have chosen are the right ones or not. You will also have an idea if your marketing techniques are geared towards your chosen niche.

What about the website content and design?

A lot of online business owners think that website design is enough to drive people into their pages. There are also others that says that content is still king. The answer is that Internet visitors are more inclined to visit a website with relevant, accurate information, as well as well-designed website.

A web analytics program can also be used to confirm if you have a well-written content and well-designed website. First, you can identify which parts of your website are getting the most clicks. Is it your Product page or Contact Us page? You can also identify how long an Internet user has stayed in your webpage. If it does not take long enough, you may want to know what is wrong with the page. It could be because the pieces of information that you shared on the page are outdated or lack more relevant data. You can make the necessary corrections and check if the changes done elicit the kind of response that you are looking for.

What about user behavior?

This is considered to be the most ideal information that you can obtain from a web analytics application. When you know the habits of your Internet users, you can identify who among them will be your prospects. You can then pick among your prospects the most qualified leads.

For one, you can identify the pages they have visited. Those who have checked out your Product page and Contact Us page are more likely interested on what you have than those who are only checking out your homepage. Moreover, those who have been visiting your web pages quite a number of times may exhibit interest more than those who checked them once.

There are several features that you can utilize from your web analytics program, but you have to ensure that you can maximize their use.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Organizing Your Lead Analysis and Metrics

2009-03-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

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Lead tracking and management are very important, yet they are also cluttered tasks. Why is that? It is because you have to face a lot of lead information and lead analytic results every day. Before you get a big headache, you must be able to find a way to work some way out of the pile of “debris” before it overwhelms you.

The answer to that is organization. You must be able to find a way to streamline the flow of information that will maximize your efficiency and productivity. This is so that you will not be confused and be eaten alive by your lead management tasks every day. So how can one do that?

Here are few tips on how you can introduce some semblance of organization into your lead management department:

You must understand that not all leads and information you receive are important.

This is true. In all forms of Internet marketing, regardless of whatever product they may promote, not all leads that are generated are important. This is because not all of them may want to buy the product you are offering. Others may have signed up for the offer just to get the freebie that you are giving away. As an Internet marketer, you need to be able to separate the ham from the spam in this line of work.

Take note of all important leads.

In this step, you should be able to keep track of all the important leads. One way of doing this is to organize them by lead score. The lead score is indicative of how much interest the lead has for your product; the higher the lead score, the greater the chances that you can convert this lead into a customer. Using the lead score, you can come up with some sort of dashboard in which you can see which leads are more likely to buy your product. They should then be monitored closely and regularly.

Use simple reports.

One common mistake that marketers make is to rely on complicated reports. That can be time-consuming, and sometimes these reports do not show much result that you can use. In order to save time and increase efficiency, it is better to structure your lead tracking reports simply. This way, you can see the data you need easily without having to figure out what each field in a table means. This is what you would usually do just to know where you stand in your marketing efforts.

Advantages of an Organized Lead Analytics Scheme

Here are some of the benefits of an organized lead tracking scheme:

The appropriate action is taken for every lead.

When you organize your lead tracking, you can gauge as accurately as possible the level of interest that the lead has for your product. This way, you can assign him or her to the appropriate marketer or sales agent in charge of a specific action. For example, a very interested lead can be assigned to someone in charge of making a sales pitch, while a less interested lead can be subjected to further nurturing and persuasion.

Everything moves faster.

With an organized lead tracking operation, there is less or no time wasted on shuffling through papers or reports just to know which lead should be assigned to whom. Everything shall move smoothly and quickly; leads are assigned to the person who is best trained to deal with them. Because of that, a lot of results are generated in a shorter time compared to the time when you were still messy and disorganized.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Google Analytics: What Do You Exactly Track?

2009-03-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

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A lot of my readers have been asking me about what are the different things they have to be mindful of when it comes to Google Analytics. I definitely understand. I have been talking about web analytics, and yet I have never really tackled much on how and what to track. Well, today is the day.

I will tell you the top things to monitor when you have Google Analytics:

File Downloads.

Normally, if you have a website, you can have a lot of files that you’re willing to share to your Internet users. You also have a short description of what they are (that’s how you actually encourage them to download the files). You should know that only those who are interested with further information will download them. Fortunately, Google Analytics allows you to keep track of the files that have been downloaded, regardless of what they are. Moreover, you will not only know which files have been downloaded, but also how many times they have been saved in somebody else’s computer or laptop. You will then have an idea which type of information your target market are looking right now.

Comments.

This is excellent if you have been running blogs into your website, or if you have been promoting your products and services through blog posts. There are two types of activities that you have to take note of. First is how many people clicked on your Submit Comment. You also have to be mindful of those who click on Post Comment. Normally, just by looking at your blog posts, you will already have an idea of how many pages have been visited and frequently commented. However, this simple technique will only be ideal if you are talking about comments on recent posts. It will be more difficult if your readers have been commenting on your posts written several months back. Your Google Analytics therefore will provide you with a more comprehensive detail when it comes to blog comments.

Opening of New Accounts.

You may also want to pay attention to the new opened accounts. Again, there are two types that you have to watch out. First, how many of them have successfully completed the registration form, and how long did they take to do it? Second, how many weren’t able to finish the form, and where did they actually stop? The answers to these questions will help you identify if you have a very effective lead form for your customers or not. If it took them so long to finish the form, then you may have to shorten it, so there will be more people who get to finish them. You can also evaluate the questions that you’ve made. Perhaps some of them are not that really important. You can remove the fields from the form.

Newsletter Subscriptions.

You may argue that you do have a mailing list. Well, mailing lists just contain the list of names and addresses. It would not tell you if your newsletter has been opened or which of the URLs that you have included were actually clicked by your e-mail users. Google Analytics becomes handy since it gives you figures that you can use to calculate your conversion rate. You can then assess if the newsletter is bringing in profits, or if you have to change this method of marketing campaign to make it more appealing to your readers.

Again, I would recommend it that you get to know your Google Analytics a lot better. If you’re not a member, then do so. It’s completely free, and you can run it together with your lead manager.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Important Tools to Have in Lead Management

2009-02-26T19:08:00.000-08:00

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Lead management is a very important process for your business. Because of that, you need to do it right if you want to record some sort of success in your operations. What best way to do that than to have the best tools there are? Of course, you also should be able to know what tools marketers use in their lead management process.

Here are some of the most important tools that you can use for lead tracking and management:

A Database

The role of a database is central to the process of lead management. Through a database, marketers can easily store relevant information on a lead to be used later on when they take action on these prospects. In here, marketers can take out information like IP addresses, contact information, the source of the lead, and many others.

Aside from acting as a reference material for lead information, a database also has other uses. For example, the pieces of information within the database make it easy for marketers to evaluate their own performances. By simply looking at how many leads or visits come from an individual marketing campaign, marketers can check how effective that campaign has been, thus setting a benchmark for future applications. Using the database, marketers can also which advertising campaigns are lagging behind and need further improvements.

There are a lot of many other ways that a database can help in the marketing and lead management processes.

Web Analytic Tools

Without these tools, there’s no a way a marketer can find out the receptiveness of the target market to their offers and products. These tools make it possible for marketers to find out how many people have visited their websites and have become interested in the offer these websites are making. For example, they are able to track visitors’ movements within your website. If they have been able to browse through more than one page in your website, then his lead could be very interested in buying your product. Another function of the web analytic tools is to show you where these links came from and even tell you what link within that page referred them to your website.

Without web analytic tools, there is no way your database can function. It is from these web analytic tools that marketers get the necessary information to input in a database, especially IP addresses. You could say that the database walks hand-in-hand with these tools while traveling down the lead management road.

Websites

Of course, without a website, there’s no a way a marketer is able to get his message out to the world--or to his niche market, at least. The website is where he places information about his products and where visitors see them. When designing a website, marketers should be able to add some so-called success pages in it.

One common example is the Contact Us page. This is usually viewed as a page where one can see contact information of the marketer. However, it has a very important role in lead management. Obviously, it is telling the lead how to get in touch with the marketer. In lead tracking, however, the number of leads generated through the contact page is used as a gauge in measuring the site’s performance.

Another one of the success pages is the Download Demo page. This is yet another page that can show how effective your marketing campaign is. This is simply where the lead downloads the demo version of your product, so he can test it and see if he likes it. Using your web analytic tools, you can find out how many people are interested in the product. You can check how many people have visited and clicked on the Download link in the page.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

The Basics of Reading Web Analytics

2009-02-13T10:22:00.000-08:00

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Web analytics is the most informative part of Internet marketing. Through web analytics, you are seeing how well the market is reacting to your advertisements and your campaigns so that you can gauge whether or not you have to improve on some parts and keep up with the others. You’d also know which parts are clearly not yielding results at all and which ones are not really reaching out to your intended market.

Web analytics, however, can be confusing for the first-timer. When you click on “stats,” for example, you can see a lot of information that, if you are not well versed in it, would be crazy. The web analytics information in your website’s control panel is composed of several information or data fields that you need to understand or know about.

However, once you learn to read what it’s in there, that won’t be a problem. You can then use the information there appropriately for your marketing campaign. Are you ready? Here are some of the things that you can see when you read your web analytic information for your website.

IP Address

The most basic information you can find is the IP address. This represents a unique address or individual in the whole of the Internet. From the number of IP addresses, people used to read how many computers or workstations (hence, people) have visited the website.

However, these days, the growth of ISPs that use proxy addresses makes it impossible to determine the unique visitors from all of them because proxies make people hold the same IP addresses. There are unique IP addresses for each network interface card; however, the ISP hides these addresses and substitutes them with the proxy address. Because of that, most web analytic software and systems now use an algorithm based not only on the IP address but also on the operating system the unit uses, among others, in order to determine the uniqueness of the visit.

Number of Visits

After the IP address column, you can see the number of visits that the same IP address has made to your website. For your lead handling functions, this number of visits is already a gauge as to what the lead score is to be assigned to this visitor. The concept is that the number of visits he makes to the visit is an indication of his interest to the content of the website and, hence, his interest to the niche market that your products belong to. This helps you to identify which visitor you can try to contact in order to try and offer a deal.

Referrers

One other column that you can see in a web analytic page is the referrer column. In this column, you can see either an IP address or a website address. Simply put, the referrer column shows you where the lead or the visitor came from or how he found out about your site.

The referrer column, like the IP address, can show you how successfully your ad campaign has become. If you are running multiple marketing campaigns--for example, article submission--the referrer column can be used to find out which of your articles or which of the article directories you have submitted to is giving you the most number of visitors and referrals.

These are the most basic information that you can find in the web analytics form of your websites. There are others, but these are the ones that you can see more clearly and the ones that you can use to find out how effective your marketing campaign is and how you can make moves to even further its effectiveness.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

The Challenges with Web Analytics

2009-01-29T21:55:00.000-08:00

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Web analytics is a process that is part of Internet marketing. Simply put, it is just the process of gathering data about the user activity on the Internet. It is used to find out to some degree what the “buzz” is all about. It addresses questions such as “What are the people interested into today?” “What are the things that can help us make good money from the Internet?”

Web analytics is simply finding out how lucrative a business idea can be. Through web analytics, you can find out if, for example, selling jewelries through the Internet can be a good idea or, if not, how we can build up hype for such a project. It is also useful for developing content for search engine optimization; these web analytic or SEO tools make it possible to research what keywords in a particular niche market is currently popular in search engines.

Based on this definition, you can see how useful web analytics is. However, web analytics is simply not for everyone. This is because of the fact that web analytics can be understood by people who are professionals in the IT field. Since every web analytic solution that there is today is biased toward people who are well-versed in IT, there are some difficulties that people who don’t belong in that category can run across when trying to perform web analytic process on their own.

For example, web analytics involve a large volume of raw data. These are raw, unprocessed data that most of the times do not give a lot of significant information. It requires a good amount of time to sift through them and weed out the important information from the “noise”--or data that are otherwise unable and unqualified. This can be frustrating to most marketers, who would tend to view web analytics as simply a waste of time and effort.

A good example of this is encountered by marketers who purchase and invest on leads from third parties. Using web analytic tools, these marketers find out that a certain number of their purchased leads are unqualified and ineligible for the product offering. They do so by looking into each every lead through a variety of marketing methods and measuring their response to determine the leads’ eligibility to the product.

For these reasons, most marketers are afraid to use web analytics and decide to just go on with their marketing campaign without making use of the tool. This is because they view web analytics as not just a measure of success, but they also view it as a measure of their failure. Other marketers also balk at web analytics because it takes up most of their time instead of getting on with their business. Whatever the reasons are, web analytics is getting more and more neglected by the marketing community especially by the non-technical people.

However, web analytics is still an important part of business. What these marketers do not understand is that web analytics is a tool that can be advantageous when used wisely. It is also a tool that can mean loss or revenue for the company.

Web analytics is not just a measure of failure; it is a gauge that you can use to find out why you are failing and which parts in your campaign would need to be improved. It also helps you to find out which parts of your campaign are successful and which ones you should leverage on to further their success. It is mainly something you use to find out how good your campaign is doing so you can decide what actions you must do about it.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Great Analytics Tools that You Can Use for Free

2009-01-16T08:18:00.000-08:00

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Why do you need to perform lead analytics? There are a lot of reasons, but we’ll try to focus on another important process in lead management: lead scoring. In here, you are going to use a set of criteria to determine which among your huge collection of leads are qualified to become customers. These could be in terms of their purchasing power of explicit information such as their age, educational background, or salary range—simply put, their demographics.

These explicit data are given by your leads. They may fill out a registration form or answer a survey. Your sales agents may ask these directly from your prospects. Now, the problem is that not all information can be true. If you are going to use these data for lead scoring, then it means the model itself has a potential of becoming wrong.

You need lead analytics to determine another kind of demographic information: implicit ones. They can provide you with more insights of the behavior or interests of your leads. How long did they stay in your website? Did they fill out a customer form? How many times did they check your e-mail or web page?

You can also perform web analytics if you have some tools with you. Fortunately, a lot of them can be used for free.

Let’s begin with Snoop. This application, unlike most web analytics programs, is desktop-based. This means that you need to download this into your system. There’s no need to worry, though, as this works in almost all kinds of operating systems. This is also ideal if you’re a terribly busy individual. You basically don’t have the time to continuously check your web-based programs. Snoop can provide you with news if something happens. For example, you will be alerted when a previous visitor once again check out your web page. You can also determine how many returning visitors you have and where they come from. Usually, you will know of any event through a sound produced by the software. You can also tag your visitors, so you can easily identify them in your system.

If you want something that is easy to use, comprehensive, and, most importantly, convenient to customize, you can select BBClone. This one doesn’t depend on other services in order to generate information for you. It can also be personalized according to the needs of your business. For instance, you can change its language or use it for a lot of website platforms like Wordpress or Drupal. It can also produce log files. Some of the information that you can get out of this is website traffic, geographical location, and preference.

Then you have 4Q. This software is quite different from the other two. It is actually a user feedback that you’re going to send to your leads when they visit your website. The main objective with this is that you need to support the numbers that you can come up with the other programs. For example, BBClone will tell you that 50 percent of your visitors are currently located in the East Coast, but it doesn’t really provide you with more information as to his interest on your business. With 4Q, you can create real customer feedback to identify the kind of relationship he wants to establish with your company. What products is he interested in? Would he like to be a business partner, or is he already an existing customer?

These tools can then work alongside your Google or Yahoo Analytics. But there’s one thing you need to do first: train your sales agents in using them. These programs will still be useless if they cannot be maximized to their fullest potential.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Know What Your E-mail Statistics Are Telling You

2009-01-02T17:23:00.000-08:00

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All those who are engaged in online marketing will never fail to use e-mail messaging. Here is why: virtually all those who visit the World Wide Web have at least one e-mail address. It can be personal or corporate account—it does not matter. With this revelation, you definitely know that there are plenty of leads out there. They can give you very high conversion rate, if you can just follow certain e-mail marketing techniques and etiquette.

But like any other marketing method, it needs to be assessed. You need to be able to analyze not only the leads you have but also the reports you have gathered based on your campaign. The result will inform you if you are doing well with it or not. Sad to say, not all reports can be true. Some of them are pretty misleading. If you go on believing them, you are just opening a lot of doors for errors in lead management. You may be working with the wrong types or leads.

Seeing Things in a Different Light

Just so you can clearly read your e-mail reports well, here are the common misconceptions that you need to know:

1. Not all e-mails labeled “delivered” are actually read. If you are fond of using Outlook, for example, you know that you can actually customize your e-mail messages. If you keep the track e-mails on, you will know which of them are sent, read, and delivered. Bounced ones will be delivered directly into your mailbox.

Just because an e-mail is labeled delivered or read does not mean that your campaign is already successful. For one, it could have been delivered but straight to their Junk Mail folder. You are aware of what e-mail users do with them. If they are marked read, it may mean that they only take a quick look at it and nothing more.

2. You have a very misleading forward rate. Referrals are considered to be an online version of the word of mouth. This means that you will have 100 percent success rate of convincing other people to even take a look at your products and services. One of the most common referral methods is Forward. All e-mails do have that, and, interestingly, it can be monitored. However, there is one major issue. Most of those that are counted are those that are being forwarded using an integrated Forward feature in the e-mail. If the reader decides to click on the Forward button immediately, this will not be traced.

3. You can still have a very high unsubscribe rate without you knowing it. Though you may be taught to honor unsubscription request from e-mail users, it does not really spell well for your business. This only means that you have one potential lead that is already wasted. That is why when you have a very low unsubscription percentage it’s something that you will be proud of.

However, it doesn’t really guarantee you anything. You may even lose your leads even without you knowing it. Let’s talk about Gmail, for example. If an e-mail sounds to be spam, all the user has to do is to click on This Is Spam, and the message directly goes to the Junk Mail folder. It’s not only a particular e-mail but all that you’re going to send to them. This will then cut down the time they spend on unsubscribing.

Because of these loopholes, you may want to consider asking for other methods of communication with your sales leads. This could include home and mobile phone number, which are definitely easier to reach than e-mails.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

The Various Aspects of Lead Analytics

2008-12-18T18:10:00.000-08:00

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Lead analytics doesn’t just happen overnight. It is composed of a series of processes, which are also considered to be essential when it comes to lead management. Unless you’re going to perform the rest of the functions right, it will be difficult for you to say that the reports generated from lead analytics are correct and thus can be helpful to your business.

Functions of Lead Analytics

There are three known important areas of lead analytics. These include lead generation, conversion, and management. Each of them is interrelated, and failing with one of them might equate to inappropriate lead analytics. Understanding how each one works therefore will be essential.

Lead Generation. This mainly focuses on the different methods of how businesses generate their leads, and there are a lot of them. You can get leads through trade shows and expos, surveys, opt-in lists, your business website—and the list goes on. When it comes to lead analytics, it’s very important that you can determine where the leads are coming from so you can also identify which of your marketing strategies are working out well for your business. For those who seem so weak, you will be given time to modify them. You can also have a very good idea of your conversion rate. After all, of the leads that you can come up with, the best ones are actually those that visit your website because they are highly interested of your products or services.

Lead Conversion. Now the process of lead analytics doesn’t end with high traffic or level of interested prospects. The most important thing is that you can convert these leads into sale, which means you are able to convince them to purchase a product or avail of the service from your company. Unless this stage is reached, leads will remain to be worthless for the company.

On the other hand, lead analytics can be used to determine your success sales rate. If you are able to convert a huge percentage of your captured leads to customers of your business, then it means that you have implemented your sales strategies accurately. If you don’t, then it will give you time to realize that you do have mistakes along the way, and you need to eliminate or correct them right away to avoid worsening the problems.

Lead Management. This is considered to be the secret for better lead analytics, as this practically covers the two mentioned areas. Lead management isn’t just about creating a database of all your sales leads. It also means tracking them to ensure that they know that your business exists. It will also provide you a way of how to increase your sales conversion rate through proper lead scoring and nurturing processes.

Using a Lead Analytics Software

Today, a number of software is available to use for lead analytics. To give you an easy example, we have Google Analytics. It’s for free, which is just ideal for those who are in start-up businesses. All you need to do is to sign up and generate a code that you can attach to your website. It will then generate figures for your traffic as well as reports that can tell you where people are coming from, how they found your website, and a lot more helpful information.

You can also make use of lead management program, which is more comprehensive than Google Analytics. For one, you don’t only get to generate the leads and identify where they are coming from, but you can also easily come up with a database of all your leads, classify, and score them.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

6 Good Reasons Why You Need to Do Web Analytics

2008-12-04T08:27:00.000-08:00

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When it comes to lead management, it’s never enough that you go through the usual process, which is scoring, distribution, and prioritization. You must learn how to keep track of results, especially when you’re doing online marketing.

Defining Web Analytics

As the name suggests, Web analytics is about evaluating the results that you can gather through the World Wide Web. It’s applicable for those who are marketing their websites in the Internet, as well as for those who have more than one market segment.

There are a lot of tools that can be utilized when it comes to Web Analytics, the most popular of which is Google Analytics. However, regardless of your choice, the benefits and eventually the uses of Web Analytics don’t change.

What You Get from Web Analytics

Knowing the benefits of Web Analytics is not only ideal for those who are in doubt about it or don’t have any idea of what it is. The learning will also be perfect for those who are doing it, and yet are getting the wrong results. Perhaps they have veered away from the main objectives of Web analytics and thus interpreted the results gathered the wrong way.

1. You can have all the essential questions garnered. When you want to evaluate results, you should always start with some questions. These queries should be answered by the data that you have. When you’re doing Internet marketing, you should be able to raise the following?

Who are my visitors?
How did they find my website?
How long did they stay in my webpage?
What keywords did they use to find my website?

2. You can better understand the behavior of your customers. Web Analytics will also give you an idea of how your potential customers are behaving, and you will be able to identify the underlying causes. For instance, you will discover where they are coming from and assess if you’re really driving the right customers into your website. You can also determine how many visitors you are getting every day and compare it to your conversion rate. If you have high click-through rate but you have very low conversion rate, then there must be something wrong with your marketing campaign or that the products you’re selling may not be the ones that are needed by your visitors.

When you are able to clearly define customer behavior, it will be a lot easier for you to develop marketing campaigns that will be geared toward them. You can also make the necessary adjustments to ensure that you can look forward to a much higher conversion rate.

3. You can test your different marketing campaigns. Would you like to know what online marketing strategies are working? You can always make use of Web Analytics. For one, it can help you identify which of the chosen keywords are currently being used by most of your visitors. You can also discover keywords that can be highly targeted, but you may have not properly optimized. This way, you will be given different ways on how to drive traffic to your webpages.

Web Analytics cannot really specify which kind of campaign is working for you or not, such as e-mail marketing. Nevertheless, with the figures that you can derive from it, you can evaluate your marketing techniques.

4. You can compare your data with industry benchmarks. In reality, this is something quite difficult to do, since there can be different methodologies used by companies belonging to the same industry. However, you can already have a good idea where you are among your competitors. After all, besides achieving high profits, you should also learn how to beat other businesses in the same field.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Using Lead Analytics Software on Your Lead Generating Providers

2008-11-19T23:20:00.000-08:00

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There is a huge number of lead generating entities that promise people quality leads that can help give your business the kind of boost it needs in terms of revenues. These lead generating companies may or may not deliver on their word and there will be times when you cannot determine whether or not you are really getting your money's worth when it comes to the leads you are getting. You can actually determine this with some form of lead management and lead analytics software that can help you sift through the leads you get from these companies. Despite the reassurances you get from these lead providers, you still can't be too sure about the kinds of leads you will be getting and knowing what you get with the help of lead analytics shows good lead management skills.

How do these lead analytics software work to help sift through the leads you get? There are some lead analytics programs that ensure that the leads you get do not have duplicates and are unique. These lead analytics programs often tell you when these leads that come in have duplicates and they tell you from which lead provider these duplicate names come from. If the same lead provider gives you a duplicate lead, you can have them deduct that lead from the list of leads you need to pay for. This can save you a lot of money since these duplicate leads can come in a lot if there is no filtering system put in place.

Another function that lead analytics software have that can prove to be very useful to your company is when you have multiple lead providers sending you leads. You can use your lead analytics software to determine which of your providers are giving you the kinds of quality leads you need and where these leads usually come from, giving you an idea as to where your most qualified leads originate from. This kind of a system gives you the opportunity to choose from numerous lead providers the best ones that can generate the kinds of lead results you need. You can see from such an analysis of how unique these leads are, how useful and lucrative they are and how complete the information on these leads are as well.

Getting yourself lead analysis software to determine whether or not you are getting your money's worth from your providers is another one of the much needed lead management strategies you need to incorporate into your business. Imagine not having to pay for the same lead a few times over and how much that can save. Imagine getting mostly leads that are useful to your company and knowing where these leads come from so you can easily focus your marketing strategies in that direction.

The amount of money you save is only the tip of this iceberg. The positive results that you get with a smart lead analysis program that helps determine whether or not you are using the right lead provider will help minimize unwanted leads that cost you time, money and effort. This kind of a software that analyzes the types of leads you get from your providers will also help you minimize lead handling time thereby creating efficiency within the team. Picture this, when you get leads that are unique, you cut down the time it takes to make one duplicate call from a duplicate lead which saves you money and effort and also eliminates the need to apologize to the same lead for calling again about your product or company. It essentially helps you maintain the kind of image you need for your company, persistent and efficient but not pushy.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

The Lowdown on What Lead Analytics Is and What It Can Do for Your Business

2008-11-06T18:51:00.000-08:00

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When you define lead analytics, you can take the word lead and the word analytics and define each one separately then combine both meanings to come up with a pretty concise definition of this marketing tool. A lead, sales lead or leads, when translated into internet jargon essentially means a person who may be looking to buy something from you. Analytics means decisions being made on the merits of data that has been gathered on a subject or a topic. Therefore, if you were to define lead analytics, it could easily mean decisions being made on data gathered about a person who is looking to buy from you.

Lead performance, on the other hand, can be defined as how a lead generates revenue for the company over a period of time or how the lead can further be expected to generate sales for you in the future with the analysis of how the lead has been behaving. Lead analysis and lead performance work hand in hand to help you and your marketing team find out what other strategies can be used to not only keep your customers from going to your competitors, these can also be used to create tailor made campaigns and marketing programs that can draw in people who exhibit the same patterns as some of your working leads.

Increasing sales is essentially what every company wants as well as the goal that every marketing team and sales team sets. How this can happen is up to how well your marketing team analyses the lead movement that can be tracked with the use of software that can trace the movement of these leads that come to your website. Lead tracking software can help you come up with the data you need to analyze the movements certain leads make and the performance these leads make as well. You can then use the data you gather from these trackers and come up with the strategies you need to boost sales for your company.

With lead analytics, a sales boost is not an impossibility, however how you go about making marketing strategies that can increase interest in what you offer and how you can retain these leads and customers is another key to this equation. While you may have the best lead tracker installed on your site and you have the most comprehensive lead analytics information on hand, not knowing what to do with this information can mean the failure of such moves. Lead analytics, lead tracking and effective marketing strategies as well as efficient sales teams complete the package needed for the boost in sales you want. If one of these elements does not work right or is off the mark, your efforts at using analytics to help make a marketing strategy that works can go down the drain.

You can also incorporate in your analytics the performance of your sales teams in dealing with leads as part of the analysis of your company and how effectively you convert leads to paying customers. The problem of non-conversions could stem from wrong lead handling, ineffective lead distribution or even a lackluster marketing campaign. Any of these can be the cause of low sales and an analysis of the way these leads move from one page of your site to another as well as how they were handled when the follow up was being made or when a sale was being concluded. The analysis of all these steps will point to how you can restructure some things in your system, who needs to be retrained, and what strategies need to be junked.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

The Power of Google Analytics

2008-10-09T21:13:00.000-07:00

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There are actually a lot of tools that you can make use of when you want to assess the performance of your sales leads. One of them is Google Analytics.

What Is It?

Google Analytics is a free application that allows businesspersons and website owners to analyze their sales leads: where they come from and what pages they have visited. Moreover, you can keep track on the performance of your marketing campaign, whether they are driving the right kind of traffic or giving you the most ideal results, so that you will be able to make the necessary changes and improvement.

What Are the Benefits of Google Analytics?

There are several things that you can look forward to with Google Analytics:

1. It is completely free. With the kind of economy that the whole world is facing right now, you don’t need an additional expense. Fortunately, Google Analytics can be availed of for free. All you need is to sign up. Your account can also be utilized when you want to make use of other Google services, such as Adwords or Adsense. If you already have a Google account before, you can already use it for Google Analytics.

2. You can use it together with your sales leads software. If you are currently utilizing a sales lead program, Google Analytics becomes an ideal partner. While the former can be used to keep track of your sales leads and can serve as a database, Google Analytics will help you feed other important information such as where the leads came from and their behavior while they are on your website. Together, they can help you gauge if you are actually driving the right kind of visitors to your website or that your online marketing campaigns are really doing well.

3. It is very easy to set up. Google Analytics is not a complicated product at all. Once you sign up, you just need to add your website and copy the code that Analytics can generate for you. You can then paste it to your website, so it will be able to keep track of your visitors.

4. You can customize the dashboard. The dashboard is configured in a way that it becomes a lot more convenient for you to pass statistical data from one person to another. You can place all the most essential information right into your dashboard and send it directly to key people, such as your sales manager or your sales agents.

5. You can compare your online marketing campaigns. Do you want to know which of your online marketing campaigns are working and which ones are not? You can use Google Analytics to provide you with the right answers. It has the ability to let you know where most of the leads come from, such as direct sites, search engine, or from referral websites. You can also determine how many of them click your ads and which ads are getting the most of click-throughs. This way, you can make better decision about it. After all, you would not like to maintain an ad that is driving a very small amount of traffic. Otherwise, it is going to cost you a lot, but you will have very little return on your investment.

6. You can compare your performance with that of the industry. Would you like to know where you actually stand against your competitors? Google Analytics has a benchmarking system, where you can identify the standards of the industry you are in and compare it to yours.

If you want to read more about Google Analytics, you can drop by http://www.google.com/analytics/.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Lead Analytics: Understanding the Different Types of Potential Customers

2008-09-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

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Face the reality: not everyone who is going to belong to your lead list is going to be your regular customers. Some of them may approach you on a per-need basis, others would just make an inquiry, while there are those who don’t share interest at all (makes you wonder why they are there in the first place). Nevertheless, part of the lead analytics strategy of your business is identifying their characteristics. This will then help you determine which of them will become your priority all throughout your lead marketing campaign.

Let’s get the ball rolling:

1. Loyalists and Devouts. Let’s call the first one the loyalists or devouts. These are the people who have been patronizing your business for so long, and they have never failed to shower you with praises for your job. They only comprise a very small group, even less than 20 percent of your total customer base, but their contribution is very huge. In fact, they can make up half of your company’s sales.

They make excellent sales leads because they are easier to convince and would likely purchase your new products or avail of your new services with just a simple marketing ad or call.

2. Per-need Leads. These are the types of sales lads that would only purchase certain types of items from you. They would also not become part of your customer base unless you have something that they need. For example, if you’re running a consumer electronics business, and your pre-need leads are looking for cameras, unless you have them, you will not be able to convert them.

These sales leads should become priorities only when you can provide them with what they’re looking for. When you do, you will almost have the same amount of success in your conversion rate with the Loyalists and Devouts.

3. Roamers. There are also people that we can call the roamers. These are the kinds of leads that should belong to the bottom list or better yet completely removed as part of your leads. They really don’t have the intention to buy your products or avail of your services for some reason. Perhaps they have accidentally added their name to the mailing list, or someone else did. Believe it or not, some may even do it just for plain fun. They also don’t fit the characteristics of your target market.

Is there any way that you can convert these Roamers into Per-need Leads? Yes, you do, but only when you can also give in to their demands or what they need. Usually, however, if they believe that the business cannot do something for them, they are uncooperative.

4. Compulsives. There are also leads that we can label as compulsives. They don’t really have anything that they particularly need at that time. They cannot also be labelled as Loyalists or Devouts since they are not repeat customers. They are, however, those individuals that would purchase products that seem good at the moment. They are also not on your top-priority lists, but make sure that you can obtain a wishlist from them, so whenever you’re ready to sell such products, you already have existing leads.

Measuring Lead Performance

The performance of your sales leads will depend on their characteristics. But it will surely help you out if you can make use of a lead analytics program. You can rank or score these leads according to their priorities, and those that emerged with high values should be the first ones to be handled. A lot of these software are already web based, so you can expect up-to-date information.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Lead Analytics: Making Lead Performance Analysis Work for You

2008-09-11T04:41:00.000-07:00

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When you are looking for positive results for your business, chances are you will want to figure out what needs to be done to make things work better. This is where analytics comes in. You will need to analyze the many angles of your business and what avenues need to be improved upon, removed or changed. With lead analytics, you are essentially analyzing the performance of the leads you have and how these leads are being handled by your sales force or team. Knowing how these leads act and how these leads are being taken care of by certain members of your staff will show you where you may need to change things up or what kind of client usually works best with your kind of business.

Lead analytics and lead performance evaluations will get you the kind of data you need for creating the kind of marketing strategy your company can work well with. You can find out how your people handle the leads that they get and what they did to produce positive results with these leads. You can also see where members of your team may have lost certain leads. This is where you can remedy the problem, with new marketing strategies or retraining. You can also use this information to restructure your teams. This means that you can put one strong mover in a team that needs guidance so that they will learn how this strong team member handles such leads and produces positive results for the company. This kind of a strategy is ideal for those who have numerous agents who do not know yet how to effectively handle the leads that they are given.

How you determine where your team may have succeeded or gone astray with the use of lead analytics is through the monitoring of the track that the lead took from acquisition to billing. When a lead is lost somewhere in between, you will see with analytics where it was lost and then you can determine why such a lead was lost and who lost it. This can be done with the use of lead management software that tracks the movement of your leads and helps you analyze the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and plans.

Aside from using your lead analytics and lead performance trackers to ascertain agent performance and marketing performance, you can also use lead analytics to help you assess how well your products and services are doing. Customer satisfaction often translates to customer retention and returns, so if your leads come back to your company for more of your products or more of your services, this means that you are meeting their needs. You can also use lead analytics to test out new services and new products, although you may need to be careful that you analyze the data correctly. You might be getting positive results from the lead analysis you are getting simply because your marketing team and strategy is working real well. You may need to analyze a few months worth of data to come up with a conclusive result for your new product analysis.

Lead analytics is indeed a very useful tool not only to find out where your team needs to improve or whether your products and services are working well for customers, but this analysis can also help with discerning the overall standing of your business. You can create new strategies, figure out where you need to improve and what you need to do to keep customers satisfied. All of these actions translate to a better business that keeps clients from going to other companies for the services and products you offer and with lead analytics and lead performance analysis, you can do just that.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com