Success Metrics of a Lead Generation Website
If the success of your website hinges on generating leads, you should be monitoring the following four metrics,
| KPI | DESCRIPTION | NOTES |
| Overall Lead Generation Rate | % of visitors that complete a lead form | |
| Lead form abandonment rate | % of visitors that start but don’t complete a lead form | Easiest for multi-page forms but Google Analytics Events can be used to measure single page forms as well. |
| Leads per day/month | # of leads over a period of time | |
| Content downloads/requests for more info | # of downloads of additional information | White papers, demo videos, webinars |
Let’s take a deep dive into the fourth success metric in this list.
How to measure content downloads and requests for more information
There are a whole host of ways that visitors to your website could indicate interest that are short of buying from you.
Connecting with you on social networking sites, downloading white papers, watching a demo video or signing up for a webinar just to scratch the surface. When site visitors take these actions, they are likely to be moving deeper into your sales and marketing funnel. Therefore, it pays to track, test and optimize these activities on your website.
For cases where you can create a “thank you” or “success” page, you can simply set up a goal page in Google Analytics for tracking purposes as we discussed in the first section on success metrics for a business blog. In the case of the white paper, you could require a form to be filled out, followed by a redirect to a “success” page where the visitor can click to download the white paper. This “success” page could be tracked as a goal page in Google Analytics.
But how do you track activities like watching demo videos or downloading documents (PDF, Excel, Word, etc) that don’t reside behind a lead form?
In these cases you can employ the use of Virtual Pageviews or Events in Google Analytics.
Let’s tackle each separately by using an example.
When to use Google Analytics Virtual Pageviews
Documents like spreadsheets, PDF’s or Word documents don’t contain the Google Analytics tracking code. Therefore you can’t track the number of people that visit these pages. Not the traditional way anyway.
With virtual pageviews you can configure a link so that, when clicked, will register a page view in Google Analytics. Here’s more information on setting up a link for a virtual pageview.
So, for example, when a site visitor clicks on a link that downloads a PDF white paper – it could register as a page view in your Google Analytics for a page that doesn’t actually exist. That’s the virtual part — get it?
You can set these “ghost” pages up as goal pages just as you would any other page on your website.
The main thing to keep in mind is that, when using Virtual Pageviews, you will be increasing the number of page views that Analytics is recording. In the case where a visitor is literally visiting a page (a PDF in this case) virtual page views makes sense.
But you probably don’t want to use virtual page views if there is not an actual page being viewed.
In those cases, you can set up Events in Google Analytics.
When to use Google Analytics Events
Events can be set as goals as well but, unlike virtual pageviews, Events don’t generate a page view. In other words, if you don’t want to artificially inflate page views, use Events rather than virtual pageviews.
Google Analytics Events has a wide range of use cases including,
- Tracking whether (and how much) of a video a visitor watches
- Interaction with widgets or other gadgets (i.e. a mortgage calculator)
- Clicks on outbound links
- File downloads
- AJAX elements
Here’s an example of Google Analytics Events tracking outbound link clicks on The Daily Egg,
You can see why I wouldn’t want to use virtual page views for this. These 8 Event Actions alone would inflate page views by ~12,000.
If you want to set up a goal using Google Analytics Events, start here.
Measurement will give you a competitive advantage
The George Harrison song lyric that opened this article is inspired by an exchange between the Cheshire Cat and Alice in Lewis Carroll’s famous tale, Alice in Wonderland.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
It’s one thing to not care where you are headed in a fairy tale — quite another when you are running a business.
But you’re smarter than that.
You know that competition is fierce. You know that as tools like Google Analytics, Crazy Egg and others get more sophisticated, it will be those that measure, test and optimize their KPI’s that will thrive.
I wish you the very best of luck!
What are the best webiste KPI’s in your opinion? What kind of website do you have and what metrics do you use to measure success?
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