What tools are working best for your online lead generation? Improveit! 360 recently posted an excellent analysis of a survey conducted by Webmarketing123. The survey asked business owners which of their digital marketing campaigns had the biggest impact. Email, SEO and paid search all had strong showings, at 26, 17 and 15 percent, respectively, but can you guess what led the pack? The answer is, of course, “Not sure,” at 33 percent. Let’s all give a big hand to confusion!
That result is worrying, to put it mildly. For starters, anytime anyone asks you a question about your business and your answer is a shrug, you have a problem. But these are digital campaigns in an era when statistical tracking of marketing effectiveness is easier than ever. Companies are practically tripping over each other’s feet in the rush to sell you analytical tools. If that’s not in your budget, you can even do analytics yourself – Improveit! outlines a few simple suggestions, including adding a “How Did You Hear About Us?” field to your Contact form, and tracking click-through rates through your email service. Simply learning how to use and read Google Analytics, a service every business owner should be subscribed to, can teach you a wealth of information about who’s visiting your site and why.
There’s a very simple reason for why you should be tracking this information – if you don’t, you’re throwing money away, and I don’t approve of that unless it’s being thrown in my direction. If you’re not tracking analytics, you have no idea how many hits and leads a campaign is bringing you. If you have no idea what a campaign is bringing you, you have no idea if your marketing expenses are turning you a profit or building up a loss. And if you have no idea if a marketing campaign is making or losing money, you don’t know whether or not to continue it.
Even if you know you’re making a profit, you’ll want to keep analyzing your stats and metrics like it’s your kid’s report card. Maybe SEO is giving you leads, but if the profit margin is slim perhaps an email campaign could boost it? There will never be a shortage of numbers to look at, simply a shortage of time to think about them.
I know the last thing you want to do after a long day is stare at row upon tiny row of numbers, percentages and statistics, but if you don’t you may find yourself staring at more red in your budget spreadsheet. The analytical tools are out there – you just need to take advantage of them, because you do not want to end up in the “Not sure” category. 
