How to Set Up Basic Web Tracking and Attribution
There are several considerations at play when one is looking to track web leads. Provided you are driving traffic from secondary search and social pages to a website of your own the answer is relatively simple. Google Analytics provides a complete set of tracking and analytics solutions to close the attribution gap. The three components necessary for this are the following:
- Set Up Call Tracking Through Google Analytics
- Have Your Forms Route to a Non Indexed Site Page
- Identify the Non Indexed Page and Calls Received as Goals in Google
The attribution aspect is the last step. The problem however is that customers don’t come from a single source (they come through several channels) and their path is not linear (they typically don’t search, find, inquire). The are a variety of ways to overcome the multichannel and non-linear nature of most purchase cycles. Most tools do this by ascribing a window of conversion. Put otherwise – if I pay for facebook advertising and a customer visits my site but only purchases or inquires about my services several days later I still ascribe the sale to my facebook advertising. The challenge of course is that a variety of channels may claim the conversion to be the result of their traffic.
Why Attribution Matter and What Can Go Wrong
The risk of mistaken attribution is that one miscalculates the cost per lead acquired on a channel. You may be only willing to spend $30 per lead generated by your facebook ads and think you are paying $22 but in fact are paying $43. This is more of a caution than a general concern. The most reliable way to adress this is to segment your campaigns and not drive PPC traffic to generic landing pages. Ideally any search or social campaign should have a unique landing page that speaks to the particulars of the campaign and offer. The results will be less confusion when it comes to attribution because you can segment traffic that originated from the unique landing page.
Talk to our team today about your unique attribution and lead tracking challenges. We are a Prince Edward County based Inbound Marketing and Lead Generation agency who services Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and the surrounding area.
