Is Your Website Stealing from You?
Chances are the answer is yes. Maybe not directly, but it is still losing you money by not tracking your valuable visitor attribution data and impacting your bottom line.
Your website should give your visitors what they need when they need it. But to provide visitors what they need, you need to know as much as you can about them. Your website should provide a wealth of visitor attribution data, but it is probably throwing it all away on you…
Why Attribution is Important
Marketing attribution is the process of identifying and tracking user actions or engagement. The goal is to determine how these actions contribute towards your desired result or goal. Marketing attribution provides a level of understanding of what combination and order of events influence individuals to engage in the desired behavior. Not only is it important to track this behavior, you must match it to the contact who engaged in the behavior.
More than Just Contact Information
Many companies collect visitor contact information or email addresses for various reasons – offer incentives to revisit the site, keep prospects up to date with offerings and more. There are many ways websites encourage customers to get in contact with you. The ubiquitous ‘Contact Us’ form, newsletter sign-ups, an email address on the ‘About Us’ page or the company phone number in the top menu are some examples.
While these methods may capture the prospect’s email, without proper attribution tracking valuable information is lost. Where did the visitor come from? What were they looking at before they filled in the form? Have they visited the site before? For other contact methods like an email address or phone number, how can you know that information was from your website?
How to ‘Secure’ your Website
Before you invest any more marketing spend on driving traffic to your site, consider the following ways to secure it against attribution loss:
Tracked Phone Numbers: The main business number is on your website? Is the same number also on online ads, print media, etc.? When someone calls the number, do you know which ad source it came from?
Invest in a call tracking solution to track the different channels, or even better a full DNI solution to track individual website visitors.
Email Contact Info: If you are going to put an email address on your website, or other marketing channels, use a unique email address per channel. Then you know where a cold email contact originated.
While there are better ways to have prospects initiate engagement, consider using a dynamic content solution for a contact email address to control how and when it gets presented.
For example, if your business only caters to local customers use geolocation based dynamic content to prevent showing the email address to visitors from outside your region or country. Why waste sales and marketing’s time on contacts who will never be a customer?
Contact Us Form: Where does the form submit data go? Are you capturing the full web session information on what the prospect was looking at before they entered their contact information? Even better, replace the ‘contact us’ in your menu with ‘book a meeting’. It does wonders for conversion rates. (There is a whole blog post on that topic)
These are some basic things to help stem the losses of website attribution, but the real solution is an integrated marketing platform that tracks full user engagement across all channels including the website, email campaigns, social media, call tracking and more. Without a comprehensive solution, you lose more than just attribution data.
