Your advertising reports show clicks. Your CRM shows customers. The difficulty is joining the two, so that you can say that a given customer came from a given campaign. The join is simple in principle and often broken in practice.
Step one: tag the links
Every link in an ad or email should carry campaign tags, usually called UTM parameters: the source, the medium and the campaign name. Agree a naming convention and keep to it. “Facebook”, “facebook” and “fb” will appear as three different sources.
Step two: remember them
A visitor rarely fills in a form on the page they land on. They read, leave and come back. The site has to remember the campaign tags from the first visit and hold them until the form is submitted. Small tools exist for this, and it can be built into the site directly.
Step three: save them on the lead
The campaign details should travel with the form into hidden fields, and from there into the CRM record. Analytics can tell you that a campaign produced thirty leads. Only the CRM can tell you which of those became customers and what they were worth.
The leads that slip through
- Phone calls. Call tracking numbers tie a call to its source.
- Live chat and intake services. Third-party tools need to pass the source along too. Ask the vendor how.
- Scheduling pages hosted on another domain, where the tags are lost unless they are handed across.
- Offline conversions. The sale that closes weeks later should be reported back to the ad platform where that is possible.
Test it yourself
Click one of your own ads, submit the form, and look at the lead in the CRM. If the campaign name is not on the record, the chain is broken somewhere, and your reports are estimates.
Related service: Web analytics.