It’s widely acknowledged that information is crucial for success in the business world. When it comes to internet marketing, the sheer volume of insights available to business leaders is invaluable.

Unlike traditional media marketing, which relies on a broad approach, internet marketing allows businesses to leverage data analytics to gain an in-depth understanding of their current and potential customers. However, not all businesses fully utilize this capability.

What Does Lead Validation Mean?

Lead validation is a process used to differentiate genuine sales leads from other types of conversions, such as phone calls and form submissions, generated through online marketing campaigns. Without this process, accurately assessing the effectiveness of lead generation efforts, including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and display advertising, becomes challenging, if not impossible. Lead validation provides marketers with the insights needed to fine-tune their websites and advertising strategies, surpassing the limitations of relying solely on inquiry data. By incorporating lead validation, online marketers can gain a clearer understanding of:

• The origin of each validated lead
• The percentage of inquiries that qualify as sales leads
• A precise cost per lead (as opposed to the potentially misleading cost per conversion)
• Effective strategies for optimizing campaign performance based on actual leads rather than the less specific “conversion” metric Armed with this information, marketers can measure and optimize their lead generation campaigns more effectively, reducing wasted resources on unqualified traffic and allocating a larger portion of their advertising budget to attract promising prospects to their website.

Case Study: Unveiling Lead Intelligence by Analyzing 373,000 Website Inquiries

At Straight North, we recognize the significant value lead validation can bring to internet marketing initiatives. In the past 18 months, our team has meticulously analyzed over 373,000 website inquiries, encompassing:

• Over 135,000 form submissions
• Over 237,000 phone calls, amounting to more than 1 million minutes

A key finding from our analysis was that approximately half of these inquiries qualified as genuine sales leads. The remaining inquiries consisted of interactions with no potential for conversion into sales, such as customer support requests, incomplete or spam form submissions, misdialed calls, and job applications. This highlights a significant issue: internet marketers often unknowingly include irrelevant inquiries in their sales lead counts, potentially leading to disastrous consequences due to inaccurate data. Let’s explore some other significant conclusions drawn from our data analysis…

The Beginning of the Week Sees a Surge in Validated Leads

Compared to other weekdays, Mondays and Tuesdays exhibit the highest correlation between conversions and validated leads.

As evident, the first half of the week demonstrates a higher likelihood of yielding a validated lead compared to the latter half (weekends show minimal activity). By integrating this insight with your own lead validation efforts, you can identify specific days and times when conversions are most likely to translate into future sales.

First Impressions Matter: The Importance of the Initial Visit

Here’s a compelling marketing statistic: almost 85% of conversions occur during a visitor’s first visit to a website. Our analysis revealed that a staggering 85% of validated leads originated from first-time visitors. Subsequent visits saw a significant decline in lead metrics, plummeting to 10% for second-time visitors and decreasing further thereafter.

This phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that many website visitors evaluate businesses based on their online presence, converting as soon as they find a company that meets their requirements. The likelihood of visitors converting into sales leads dwindles significantly after their initial visit, underscoring the importance for internet marketers to prioritize website optimization for first-time visitor conversions. This becomes even more crucial when marketers rely on inaccurate or incomplete data. While a robust remarketing strategy and a well-designed nurture funnel can enhance the value of subsequent site visits, nothing surpasses the impact of a stellar first impression.

Incomplete Information: The Pitfalls of No Lead Validation

The majority of online marketers rely solely on inquiry data, lacking crucial information about which inquiries represent actual sales leads and neglecting valuable phone inquiry data. For instance, relying solely on Google Analytics goal tracking data to evaluate online marketing campaign performance can lead to significant data gaps, including:

• Focus on form submission counts without qualitative analysis
• Exclusion of phone call data, potentially omitting up to 60% of crucial insights
• Inability to view the actual form submissions recorded as goals
• Lack of validation regarding whether goal completions represent actual sales leads Without this crucial layer of information, marketers operate in the dark regarding the true sources of valuable sales leads, potentially overlooking areas requiring attention and misallocating resources based on skewed data.

Lead Validation: Crucial for Understanding True Cost per Lead

Marketers aiming to determine return on investment (ROI) based on lead generation data that hasn’t undergone the lead validation process risk basing their calculations on information that is almost 50% inaccurate.

Consider this example: a website has two traffic sources generating conversions. Based on raw analytics, Source 1 yields 50 conversions, while Source 2 yields 100 conversions. Most marketers would prioritize optimizing Source 2’s performance, assuming it to be more valuable. However, this decision would be based on incomplete information. After subjecting all conversions to a lead validation process, it becomes apparent that Source 1 generated 40 genuine sales leads, whereas Source 2 only generated 25. By focusing solely on Source 2 based on raw conversion data, the marketer inadvertently neglected Source 1, resulting in lost sales that outweighed the potential gains from Source 2. This example underscores the paramount importance of lead validation for internet marketers, despite its absence in many campaigns. Without it, marketers risk making uninformed decisions.