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How to Measure Lead Generation with Effective Marketing Dashboards

April 4, 2019

Mieke Houbrechts

How to effectively measure lead generation? Discover the critical KPIs and get started with our lead generation template dashboard.

Nowadays, 66% of marketing data is used to better focus on targeting offers, messages and content. New emerging marketing technologies, popularly referred to as MarTech, can be of great help to set up this improved targeting in a data-driven way.

But which data or information do marketers need the most? What are the KPIs they track in different stages of the marketing funnel? And how can their favorite marketing automation or MarTech tools help them to analyze that data?

In this new blog post series, we’ll deep-dive into the KPIs that are important in different disciplines & stages in the marketing process. To make it more specific, we’ll add interactive examples of marketing dashboards.

Getting started measuring lead generation

Many marketers struggle with the amount of marketing data that is available. Tracking & measuring too many metrics will lead to more confusion, rather than finding clear insights. To make a selection of useful marketing data, you can follow this rule of thumb:

Decide on your most important marketing goals first. Then, select the numbers & metrics that reflect how you’re achieving those marketing goals.

Before diving into how to define KPIs for your specific marketing objectives, it’s helpful to have a framework to structure all your marketing efforts. This is why we’ll focus on 3 general marketing disciplines.

  1. Lead Generation: how to get potential buyers to your website and convert them from unknown visitor to known lead?
  2. Lead Nurturing: how to engage leads with your marketing content or messages up to the point of marketing qualified lead (MQL)?
  3. Revenue & marketing ROI: how to turn marketing spend into revenue?
Illustration of 3 domains of marketing measurements

Across our blog series, we’ll show the main KPIs in each domain and how to use them in a marketing dashboard. Let’s start with the first one!

How to measure lead generation?

The first discipline we’ll look at is lead generation. In terms of the inbound marketing funnel below, this means we’re starting at the top. How do you attract people to your website and drive them to take a valuable action?

Typical challenges for top-of-funnel marketing include:

  • Increasing volume of visitors via multiple marketing channels
  • Increasing the number of conversions, which could be a sale, a content download, a contact form, a free trial,…
  • Improving conversion rate from a visit to an action you specified – typically an action where the prospect leaves his or her data
How to measure lead generation across the inbound marketing funnel
Example of the inbound marketing funnel - Image source: The Pixel

To overcome these challenges, have a look at your data to see what’s blocking the funnel. By analyzing what’s working well and what’s not, you can optimize the way in which you attract new people to your website.

Marketing metrics for lead generation

To optimize how visitors are finding their way to your website and on your website, there are a number of metrics to track.

Which sources are bringing the most traffic to our website? Of those sources, which ones have the highest conversion rate to lead? What do they do on your website before converting?

In the end, lead generation is about finding levers to grow a steady amount of traffic and optimizing your website to convert these visitors into leads.

Below, you’ll find a list of key lead generation metrics to help you identify those levers.

  • Number of website visitors
  • Number of CTA clicks
  • Number of conversions
  • Website conversion rate

Besides key metrics like visitors and conversions, we've also included a couple of categories to drill down on each of those metrics. For example, you can first look at the total number of visitors & then drill down on the number of visitors per marketing channel.

  • By marketing channel
  • By marketing campaign
  • By visitor type (e.g. new vs returning visitor)
  • By conversion type (e.g. purchase vs newsletter signup)
  • By CTA type

How to build a lead generation dashboard

Once you know which data you want to monitor, you’ll want to gather it into some type of report. The best way to do this is by creating an interactive dashboard on your traffic & lead generation data. There are quite some advantages to this approach:

  • You’ll win time, because you don’t have to waste time on building manual reports each time in Excel or other statistical tools
  • You can report much faster on your marketing performance: the dashboards update automatically with the most recent information
  • Dashboards are visually attractive: analyze the data in one glance, and tell your story with visuals that prove your reasoning

Below, you can find an example dashboard for traffic & lead generation. Explore the data by simply clicking & filtering in the dashboard.

How to use a lead generation dashboard

Dashboards like the one above serve as a working instrument to improve your marketing activities. They are helpful on different levels of reporting.

  1. Keep a global overview of your top-of-funnel marketing activities
  2. Analyze in detail how specific aspects of your marketing perform
  3. Easily report marketing results to your manager
  4. Make data-driven decisions to spread your marketing budget

Let’s dive into how you can use the example dashboard for each of those goals.

1. How to maintain a high-level overview

To see in one glance if you’re steadily bringing leads into the pipeline, the first chart in the dashboard is a perfect example.

You can easily compare the amount of website visitors and leads over time. In this case for example, you see that the number of visitors & leads has dropped after January 2019. This can be an indication to search for the cause of this drop and how to fix it.

2. How to drill down on specific data

Continuing the example, let’s say you want to know why traffic dropped. A good reflex would be to see what happened in January 2019 when there was a good amount of traffic. What was different in the period after?

Example of how to measure lead generation with an interactive dashboard

By filtering the embedded dashboard above interactively, you'll see that in Jan 2019, you ran a highly successful television campaign. Based on this, you can take action and run a campaign similar to the television campaign.

3. Reporting to management or customers

You can simply share the dashboard with your manager, so he or she can interact and filter to find the information they would like to see. Instead of creating a manual report in Excel, your manager can consult the real-time dashboard whenever he or she wants.

The same goes in case of reporting towards clients or other stakeholders. If you integrate this dashboard into your customer portal or application, customers will always have access to the latest information.

4. Making data-driven marketing decisions

You can use the dashboard for marketing budget distribution. Let’s look at the conversion of different marketing assets and acquisition channels. Use the pickers on top of the chart to interactively switch between channels and asset types.

In terms of paid marketing channels, paid search has a better conversion rate than social media. This could help you decide to spend more budget on paid search compared to social media.

Build your own lead generation dashboards

If you’re using Google Analytics or any other website tracking, you can quite easily build a traffic & lead generation dashboard for your business.

In addition to that, if you’re using a marketing automation tool, you might be lucky to already have this type of reporting available inside your marketing automation software!

Are you running a marketing SaaS platform and interested to learn more about dashboards for your platform? You can have your first embedded dashboard up and running in just a few days! Get in touch and we’re happy to give you a demo.

Build your first embedded dashboard in less than 15 min

Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo  or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.

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