“If you build it, they will come” the voice ominously spoke in Field of Dreams. Often, we think the same about our websites. If we build them, design them well, and maybe even create a Google Adwords campaign, the traffic will come. Unfortunately, traffic doesn’t pay the bills, we need our visitors to do something once they arrive at our site.
Google says the conversion events can be:
- Purchase
- Sign-up
- Page view
- Lead generation
Search Engine Journal expands the conversion events with:
- Up-sell or Cross-sells
- Video views
- RSS Subscribe
- Forward to a Friend
- Social Engagement
- PDF Download
Most of these intangible events can more broadly be defined under the lead generation category. Whether Search Engine Optimization “SEO” or Pay Per Click “PPC,” Bluegill focuses efforts for our clients to capture at least some basic information from the visitors to our site (name, telephone number, email address).
But maybe your business is different and you cannot broadly define the capture of that information as a “lead.” Damien Bianchi wrote a nice article this week that assists in the definition of lead results. He offers the following points of clarification:
- Understand which activities on the website constitute a lead.
- Name these activities and list the pages on which these conversions occur and are tracked.
- Understand what happens offline to that lead and whether or not it is tracked.
- Is there a monetary value attached to the lead? If so, what is it?
- Outside of leads, are there other conversion actions that are valuable to the business? If so, what are they and where (which pages) are they tracked?
What results are you measuring?
