How to Track Where Your Leads Actually Come From
A major topic that’s been coming up a lot lately with our clients is lead attribution. Given all the various channels and data points we are looking at to assess brand visibility and authority, it’s really important to pause and ask, “Where are leads actually coming from?” We also have to make sure the leads we are counting are worth the attention.
Why Lead Attribution is Harder Than It Seems
At face value, it seems like it would be pretty straightforward to know the source of leads. There are data points for literally everything now. However, we all know from personal experience that customer journeys are not linear. We may see something on social media, read about it somewhere online, hear about it on a podcast, try it on in store, chat about it with friends, and then maybe finally make a purchase through Amazon. The B2B buying journey is similarly rhizomatic and further complicated by the number of stakeholders involved.
How Do You Know If Your Lead Tracking Is Accurate?
We sit with our clients and analyze the data they have from their CRM, such as HubSpot or Salesforce. Some clients alternatively share forms emailed to them from WordPress. We compare the information they are seeing to the data we pull from GA4 to make sure, first and foremost, that we are seeing the same numbers.
If our numbers do not match, we have to investigate how tracking is set up in the platform’s tag manager. If the numbers are pulled from a point in the customer journey that is not representative of the engagement we want to track, then we need to establish another touchpoint to measure that is more accurate to the experience.
Are You Tracking Leads that Actually Matter?
The other side of this coin is, of course, lead quality. When we track leads, we have to know how many of them have value. We have to separate bot activity from real human engagement, and then we also need to understand how much of the real human engagement actually converts.
What Happened When GA4 Showed 120 Leads, and HubSpot Showed 20
We have a client that had tracking already set up in GA4 to measure form fills on the website. Everything looked great from our end. GA4 showed lead volume improving 20% month over month, with about 120 leads brought in from a request demo form alone. Well, after meeting with the client, we learned that, in HubSpot, they actually got about 20 leads from the request demo form. The discrepancy led us to take a look at how we are tracking the form fills.
Depending on how the original GA4 event was configured, it was likely counting actions that didn’t actually result in a successful lead submission, like form submission attempts, duplicate events, bot activity, and form interactions.
How We Fixed Lead Tracking When The Numbers Didn’t Match
The solution was to work with the client to set up a thank you page that users will be directed to after filling out the form and set up an event to fire when that page is loaded. Now we are tracking completed form submissions rather than measuring all the interactions with the form. The numbers in HubSpot and GA4 are aligned, and we have clearer data to use for strategizing growth initiatives.
Get a Clearer Picture of Where Your Leads Are Coming From
If you’re struggling to sift through all your data and decide what to do with your marketing budget, we can help. We offer free, no-obligation video audits, in which we will review your site and provide our hot take on where your opportunities lie.
