Attribution is the heart and soul of marketing analytics. Being able to determine which leads, opportunities, and revenue come from your marketing efforts is crucial. Search marketing now accounts for 49% of digital marketing budgets (MarketingProfs), and being able to prove the ROI driven by those online sources is the only way to keep that budget growing. For many marketers, web forms are the primary way to capture online leads. This has become standard practice in the industry, and tracking the lead source through forms is fairly simply. But what if that lead doesn’t want to take the time to fill out a form? What happens to them? They still came in through one of your online sources, but do you have way to capture that if they don’t fill out a form? When that lead decides to pick up the phone instead of filling out a form, they usually slip through the cracks of marketing attribution. With the rapid adoption of mobile phones, it has become easier then ever to call a business instead of staying online. In order to close that hole in your attribution and capture those leads that go offline, you need call tracking.
By adding call tracking to your array of attribution tools, you gain the ability to claim leads that came in over the phone as marketing leads. Typically, people who pick up the phone are further along in the buying process and are much more likely to turn into a customer. In addition, 61% of SMBs rate telephone leads as excellent or good, higher than any other lead type (BIA/Kelsey report, 2012). Missing out on attributing phone leads to marketing can be a deadly mistake. In order to accentuate this point, we performed an internal review of our own search marketing efforts. The following is the result of our analysis.
Findings
| Conversion Type | Leads Per Year | Deals Per Year | Revenue Per Year |
| Web Forms | 66% | 34% | 37% |
| Inbound Calls | 34% | 66% | 63% |
Key Takeaways
Throughout a one-year period, search marketing generated a higher number of leads from web forms, but those leads don’t convert anywhere near the rate at which phone leads convert. Without the ability to attribute phone leads to marketing sources, these numbers would have been drastically different. Here are a few important insights from the data:
- Web forms account for only 66% of online lead capture
- 23% of inbound calls convert to sales compared to 6% of web forms
- 66% of won deals came from inbound calls
- Without call tracking, only 37% of revenue can be attributed to marketing
Being able to claim almost 3x more revenue as being generated from marketing can have a tremendous impact on your organization. By only taking credit for leads that are generated through web forms, you miss a huge opportunity to prove the importance of your marketing and increase your budget. Phone leads are 4x more likely to convert into a sale, so taking credit for those leads is huge. If you still aren’t convinced, take a look at our white paper, Tracking Phone Leads: The Missing Piece of Marketing Automation.
