From acquiring traffic on your website to revenue recorded in your CRM, what has been missing in the past (and with the exclusive use of Google Analytics) is the link that makes it possible to attribute revenue to your marketing actions (trade shows, paid campaigns, social networks, SEO, etc.). Measuring profitability is essential.
In the age of Marketing Automation, we now have the tool that connects these anonymous visitors generated on your site thanks to your acquisition campaigns, your sales opportunities, and the revenue generated. So here is how we do it at Webmecanik with the help of our much-loved software Webmecanik Automation.
Measuring profitability: first touch attribution, the source of your lead
Define the sources
To define the source of a visitor on our site or of a contact whose details I have been able to collect, we are going to use UTMs for incoming traffic. What are UTMs?
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module; it is a URL tracking system used in digital marketing campaigns that makes it possible to identify and track traffic coming from different campaigns.
UTM parameters are placed at the end of the URL after a question mark, without affecting access to the page. They generally consist of 3 main parameters (utm source / media / campaign) used to characterize the medium and the campaign used.
This is a very useful tool because it will allow us to create different URLs that lead to the same page. This will allow us to categorize visitors according to the URL they used (and the UTMs used).
Define your tagging plan
This is the mapping of your UTMs: you are going to define the different acquisition sources (Ads, Linkedin, SEO, Twitter, Facebook, Trade Shows, etc.) and the criteria for being assigned to each source.
The idea is that every time you share a link in the future, you know which UTM to add to the link depending on where you are going to use or share it.
Thus, https://monlien.com/monarticledeblog will become https://monlien.com/monarticledeblog?utm_source=ads for my Google Ads campaigns and https://monlien.com/monarticledeblog?utm_source=twitter for my Twitter post.
In all 3 cases, visitors will arrive on exactly the same page, only with this information in the URL, which will be very valuable to us!
Note: in the case of acquiring a contact list without going through web acquisition sources, it is impossible to use UTMs. However, you can also, in your tagging plan, define a source such as “Trade Show.” You enter this specific source in the same place as the UTMs during the next step.
Assign and preserve sources to measure profitability
Now that you have the information about the visitor’s source in their URL, you need to save it on the contact record that will be created when your visitor submits the form on your beautiful landing page created to offer your latest white paper or webinar.
- Recording the information on contacts (and/or companies).
- Keeping this information without overwriting it with a new source.
Now that we know the traffic generated by source and the number of leads by source, the crucial step that remains is to associate the source with customers, and therefore with revenue, before measuring profitability.
- Create your form on your favorite marketing automation tool
- Add a hidden “source” field to save the data on the contact (or company) record.
For my part, I put a default value of “SEO,” so a contact without a UTM is presumably a contact who came from organic search. - Add an HTML area field and paste the script available at this link, which automatically saves the UTM value in the hidden field from step 2.
Be careful, it is also very important not to overwrite this value afterward. Indeed, a contact may arrive through your Ads campaigns, then come back later by typing your company name into Google. The second time, they will probably be associated with SEO, but it is actually the first acquisition source that interests us. In this case, it is the Ads campaign that made you visible to them and brought them back later.
Note: you can also save the source on the contact’s company record. This will depend on your CRM management. Do you assign generated revenue to contacts or to companies in your CRM? Depending on the answer, adapt where the source is stored so you can have effective reports in your CRM.
At this stage, you know how to attribute your leads to an acquisition channel and therefore determine an average cost per lead by channel! This is already a very good first step that will allow you to direct your acquisition budgets.
But be careful: a cheap lead does not mean a good lead. An expensive lead does not mean it is a good lead either.
So the ultimate step of your ROI analysis remains: attributing your revenue by acquisition source.
Link acquisition source and revenue
This is the point where you need a link between your CRM and your Marketing Automation software. Webmecanik Automation offers a large number of CRM integrations, notably with French solutions.
So set up this data synchronization, making sure to match the “source” field in your marketing automation software (on contacts or companies) with your CRM (you will probably need to create a field in your CRM as well).
Now that the acquisition source of your contacts and/or companies is filled in in your CRM, all you have to do is use the reporting features to display the revenue generated by acquisition source!
ROI analysis by source
To go all the way and with the goal of making your actions profitable, all that remains is to associate the budget you have invested by acquisition source with the revenue reporting we mentioned earlier.
Export this dashboard to your favorite spreadsheet, add an “investment” column with your spending by acquisition channel, as well as an ROI column with the formula REVENUE ÷ INVESTMENT = ROI.
That’s it, you know how much €1 of revenue costs you in investment, precisely by attribution channel. It’s up to you to pull the right levers to improve your margin!
