The lead generation product you use is hiding something from you. Do you really know if it’s telling you the truth? Can you trust what the numbers tell you about how many potential new customers it’s generating? Most lead generation websites have a dirty little secret, but it’s not their fault. There is a way to get your website to tell you the whole truth, but many online marketers don’t know about it.

The dirty little secret of many lead generation websites is that their conversion statistics aren’t telling the whole truth. Here’s what you need to know:

• Google Analytics gives you the number of conversions your website generates. But it doesn’t tell you anything about if those conversions are actually sales leads. That’s a real problem, because nearly half of the time, conversions do not equal sales leads.
• About half of website conversions turn out to be customer service requests, job applications and incomplete form submissions.
• These conversions have almost zero chance of becoming new customers. However, many marketers count them all the same as true sales leads.

This level of misinformation can cause marketers to make some dangerous assumptions about how well their websites work. Based on the incomplete information the raw conversion numbers give them, they may overemphasize sources that generate a lot of those conversions that aren’t sales leads. This can result in websites that have a very skewed signal-to-noise ratio when it comes to creating leads.

Although it can be a laborious and time-consuming process, lead validation is the key to getting the best information out of your lead generation website. It can tell you not only which conversions have the potential to become new customers, but where exactly in your site they were converted. Read the following presentation for more information about how lead validation can get your website to stop keeping secrets from you.

The Critical Importance Of Lead Validation In Internet Marketing

 

Aaron Wittersheim is Chief Operating Officer at Internet marketing agency Straight North. You can tweet him @straightnorth

 

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