Marketing ROI: How to Better Measure Marketing Success

Marketing ROI is a vital success metric for any business. It tells you if your marketing is worthwhile. Marketing departments that can track positive ROI get rewarded with increased marketing budgets. The marketing team also learns which campaigns work and are worth repeating.

It’s easy to see why marketing ROI matters. Calculating marketing ROI is only possible, however, if you have the right tools.

You know how much you’re spending on marketing, but do you know how much revenue you’re generating from each marketing channel? Measuring ROI is the best way to prove marketing success.

There is a problem with other metrics like click-through rate, impressions, page views, and web traffic. None of these metrics are tied to revenue.

WhatConverts solves this problem by measuring marketing based on individual leads.

Sign up here for a free 14-day WhatConverts trial. You can also request a 30-minute live demo, where we’ll answer your questions and show you how to track marketing ROI.

Employees at all levels of the company understand that leads fuel sales. That’s why leads are the most important marketing metric. In the article below, we’ll explain the following:

1. How to use leads as the defining marketing metric
2. How to track marketing attribution for every lead
3. How to use marketing tools to track qualified leads
4. How to prove marketing value for specific channels
5. How to change your reporting to reflect marketing ROI

Leads are the defining marketing metric for ROI

Are you using clicks, impressions and traffic to measure the success of your campaigns? You might even be taking it a step further by measuring conversions too. These traditional marketing metrics have one thing in common; they’re actions people take on their way to becoming a lead.

If marketers are trying to drive leads, shouldn’t they measure marketing success based on leads?

Capturing leads helps tie marketing to sales. It also helps simplify communications with stakeholders outside the marketing department. CEOs and salespeople may struggle to see a clear connection between clicks and revenue.

If you’re trying to prove that your marketing is working, you need to prove that it’s delivering leads. It's hard to see marketing value when you can’t show how many leads you’re getting from your marketing.

How to track marketing attribution for every lead

Most marketing tools track surface-level information about leads. Google Analytics, for instance, tells you how many goal completions occurred in a given time frame.

You can see that someone came from an organic search and completed a goal, but you don’t know who that person is.

Google Analytics will show that someone clicked on a Google Ad and placed a call to your business, but you can’t identify the person.

Anonymous conversion data can be misleading because not all conversions are leads.

To measure marketing ROI, you must tie individual leads to marketing campaigns. You need to know that a lead worth $10,000 in potential sales called your business after seeing a Google Ad. WhatConverts can provide these types of reports.

Call Tracking Tools Can Boost your Marketing ROI Numbers

In some industries, the most valuable leads come via phone call. Phone call leads convert 30 percent faster than leads from form-fills and web chats.

The only way to ensure your marketing gets credit for every lead is to capture every lead. Since phone calls are offline conversions, most conversion tracking tools can’t tie phone calls to a marketing source.

WhatConverts call tracking software solves this issue. You can track marketing attribution for phone leads that had been slipping through cracks.

Sign up here for a free 14-day WhatConverts trial. You can also request a 30-minute live demo, where we’ll answer your questions and show you how to track marketing ROI.

Call tracking software ensures every lead is in your marketing reports, giving you the full picture of marketing ROI.

It’s Time to Start Tracking Qualified Leads

Do you feel the need to dig into conversion data to see how many conversions resulted in qualified leads? Proving marketing ROI requires that you look beyond conversions to make sure there are real leads behind the conversion data. If you struggle to find a way to identify quality leads, you aren’t alone. According to SalesForce research, 32 percent of B2B marketers say “lead quality” is one of their biggest challenges.

It’s not enough to know that someone filled out a form. That person could be a solicitor, or a spammer, or someone who lacks the budget to afford your product/service. Those types of conversions are known as non-qualified leads. They aren’t actual leads, and shouldn’t be in your marketing data.

Conversion-based tools like Google Analytics show that conversions are happening. They don’t tell you whether conversions are resulting in qualified leads. Without this information, you can’t be sure that your marketing is delivering sales-ready leads.

WhatConverts brings lead qualification data to the forefront. Reporting on marketing ROI is as easy as clicking on a report that shows qualified leads.

Using WhatConverts to identify quotable leads

With WhatConverts, you can qualify leads with simple “Yes/No” buttons to remove junk leads from your marketing data.

Your marketing reports will only include qualified leads, This cleans up your marketing data so you can better measure marketing ROI.

You can also add quote value to leads, giving you a clear picture of how much revenue you’re getting from each marketing campaign.

The lead data shows the marketing source and the quoted value. This provides a clear connection between marketing and potential revenue. Once you can track the value of a single lead, you can explain how many potential sales you’re driving and prove your marketing ROI.

Measuring marketing ROI for specific marketing channels

Marketing ROI allows you to separate effective marketing channels from ineffective marketing channels. You could be spending too much on PPC ads when you should be focusing more on driving organic traffic. Revenue-related metrics reveal which channels drive sales and which channels are a waste of time.

In WhatConverts, you can filter your data by source, and by landing page.

Discover the ROI of your SEO

With WhatConverts, you can generate a report that shows how many leads started their buyer journey on a specific landing page. This report will reveal which landing pages are help you grow your audience and find potential customers.

You can then filter that report to show how many phone calls (or chats, or form fills) came from that landing page. It's also possible to see the contact info and even play the call recording for each lead.

Landing page reports can help you:

• Prove the value of an SEO content strategy
• Identify the pieces of SEO content that generate the most leads.
• Optimize organic search efforts based on which landing pages drive leads

Organic search is a murky area for many marketers. Paid advertising channels offer far more metrics that help you track conversions. SEO tends to rely on broad metrics like web traffic and search ranking. With WhatConverts, you can track organic leads stranger to customer. This shows you exactly how your SEO efforts are impacting your sales funnel.

Track the Marketing ROI of Google Ads

Do you ever wonder why your Google Ads don’t seem to generate revenue despite good performance numbers? It’s frustrating when an ad has a high click-through rate but you don’t see the revenue numbers to match. This could be a sign that you’re not targeting the right keywords, and WhatConverts can help you uncover the issue.

WhatConverts tracks every Google Ads lead back to the ad, campaign and keyword. You’ll be able to see information such as:

• Which ads deliver qualified leads
• Which keywords are driving your most valuable leads
• Which ads have hollow performance metrics
• Which keywords deserve increased bids

WhatConverts beats standard Google Ads reporting because we show you the individual lead data. You can see that a real person clicked on your ad then called your business, and you can listen to the call recording to find out what they wanted. This allows you to properly assess the value of each lead, then tie it back to the Google Ads campaign that delivered it.

Measure the ROI of Paid Social

One of the issues with social media advertising is that the performance numbers often don’t align with the actual conversion numbers. For example, LinkedIn’s click data includes people who visited your social profile; they aren’t always people coming to your website.

Social media advertising has a lot of variables. You have different ads, images, platforms and audiences. It’s important to identify the ads and channels that work best then double down on those efforts.

Sign up here for a free 14-day WhatConverts trial. You can also request a 30-minute live demo, where we’ll answer your questions and show you how to track marketing ROI.

If you’re advertising on all social platforms, you should look at the lead data to see which platforms are delivering valuable leads. It’s easy to waste money on ineffective social advertising if you aren’t careful.

WhatConverts tracks every social media lead back to the specific ad campaign and content. With lead qualification and lead value features, you’ll be able to identify the social ads that are working.

WhatConverts allows you to answer important questions about social media advertising:

• Am I getting a positive ROI from social media advertising?
• What is the cost per conversion of Facebook compared to Twitter or LinkedIn?

Changing your reporting to reflect marketing ROI

Over 46 percent of Chief Marketing Officers say their number one concern is driving efficiency in marketing. How do you drive efficiency? It starts by doubling down on effective marketing channels and cutting back on ineffective channels. To do this, you need to produce reports that show which channels drive leads and deliver positive ROI.

It’s time to do away with reporting that focuses on non-revenue related metrics like clicks and conversions. These metrics don’t help marketers answer the ultimate question of which marketing channels drive leads.

WhatConverts takes a different approach to reporting. Our reporting system sits on top of our lead capture system. This gives marketers one platform for tracking, organizing and reporting on leads. We also use lead-based reporting. That means every report shows how marketing drives leads. You can report on leads from each channel, qualified leads, or quote/sales value of leads.

Lead-based reporting can change your perspective on marketing. You don’t have to rely on surface-level metrics like conversions and impressions. Instead, you can focus on the metric that matters most; leads.

Sign up here for a free 14-day WhatConverts trial. You can also request a 30-minute live demo, where we’ll answer your questions and show you how to track marketing ROI.