When you’re generating leads online you generally setup conversion tracking and measure and optimise every campaign you’re running. Over time, you cut the poor performing campaigns and allocate budgets to the channels delivering the lowest cost per conversion. This strategy results in your cost per lead decreasing month-on-month, which is great.

But there’s one element that a lot of companies are missing when running campaigns in this way, and that is lead quality.

If you’re not tracking the quality of your leads correctly, then over time you could be optimising for lower quality leads. This can look great in terms of cost per lead and volume, but the leads ultimately do not convert into sales and waste a lot of your team’s time.

If your company isn’t optimising your marketing based on lead quality, the good news is it’s a relatively simple issue to solve and one that will make a big impact to your results long term.

So how do you track & optimise for lead quality?

To start tracking lead quality, all you need to do is start tracking where each individual lead has come from. This could be either the first channel they touch or the last, depending on which attribution model you’re most comfortable with.

To set this up, firstly make sure every single channel you’re using is utilising Google’s UTM tracking (even your offline campaigns) and appending the source, medium and campaign to the URL the ads are sending traffic to.

You’ll then need to work with your developer to modify your website and forms. Essentially what they need to do is:

  1. Pull the tracking data from the URL and the referrer string as soon as a prospect lands on the website.
  2. Set a cookie with this data, and, if using last-source attribution, overwrite it if a prospect returns.
  3. When the prospect submits a form, send the source, medium, campaign and referrer as hidden form fields into your CRM system or into the email that’s sent with the lead details.

Once you’re receiving the data, your sales team should mark down which leads are good and which are bad as they come in. The data can then be compiled into a report, which will show each source and how many good and bad leads it generated.

With the report you’ve created, you’ll then be able to see what your “cost per quality lead” is for each campaign. This will allow you to optimise and improve the number of quality leads you’re getting – not just the overall volume.

Over time, you’ll see less leads and a higher cost per conversion, but your sales team will have more time to spend on the best leads, they’ll stop complaining about lead quality, and you’ll close more sales overall.

Once you have the basics setup, you could then extend this further and score your leads out of ten so that you give more weighting to the best leads. You could also optimise based on sales using this same method if you have a short enough lead time.

Like all types of tracking, this won’t give you perfect data. Things like cross-device issues, the attribution model you choose, and issues tracking ‘direct’ and ‘organic’ accurately will affect your results. But the more data you have, the more accurately you can make decisions, so it’s well worth setting up.