Today as the web plays such an important role in our marketing, many sales processes start online but they often they complete offline (for example on the phone). New technologies from Google make it easier than ever effectively to track the original source of a sale.
You spend time and money on marketing and advertising to attract new business but knowing which spend makes the difference is an age old problem.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
This shrewd observation is attributed to John Wanamaker (1838-1922) one of the great pioneers of advertising.
Closing the loop on tracking sales that start online but complete either online or offline (e.g. in your call centre), can now more effectively be achieved by implementing Google’s measurement protocol within your systems.
Google’s measurement protocol
Google’s measurement protocol coupled with Universal Analytics provides a way to send Google Analytics data about the sale, which can then be matched up to the original marketing that started the process.
Lets imagine someone arrives at your website by clicking on one of your Google AdWords ads. They will be tagged with a unique ID. They completed an enquiry form about a service or product that you provide and when they do, the unique ID gets stored against their contact record in your CRM system.
Some time pases and they phone into your sales team and buy the service. When the transaction is recorded in your CRM as complete, your system sends the revenue details of that transaction over to Google Analytics and it is matched up against their unique ID. You now can see which marketing initially lead them to find you and attribute credit accordingly.
As this data amasses, you will be able to make more and more accurate decisions about what spend actually leads to real sales results.