The Five Most Important Metrics Successful Lead Generators are Tracking Right Now

Running your lead generation campaign without tracking the right metrics is like flying a plane through a heavy storm without a radar system. As Peter Drucker once famously said, “what gets measured gets managed” – or in other words, if you’re measuring the wrong things, you’re managing the wrong things too.

Sure, you can measure your success based on how many hits your website is getting, but as you may already know, HITS simply stands for “How Idiots Track Success”. If you want to measure your campaigns the right way, then keep on reading.

The following metrics are the ones that have been proved to turn the needle up on lead generation campaigns the world over through millions of dollars of media spend.

Metric One: Earning Per Click (EPC)

Possibly the most important metric to measure is your EPC. This tells you how much you are earning per click that gets sent to your landing page, and is the only reliable way you’ll be able to scale up your profits when you crack what’s working.

So how do you measure your gross EPC? Well, we’re going to need to introduce a few more metrics into the equation. Let’s take a look:

A. Revenue Per Sale B. Total Sales C. Total Number of Clicks

Here’s the formula:

EPC = (AxB)/C

So, now that you’ve worked out what your EPC is, you can reverse engineer the process, and find the places for acquiring target clicks.

Pro Tips:

• Focus on your own EPC first, and look at other more specific EPC numbers after. Don’t use these as gospel – for all you know, they could be getting traffic and sending clicks from wildly different sources, which will impact results.

• The above formula shows Gross EPC. To work out your Net EPC, just switch Revenue Per Sale with Profit Per Sale.

Metric Two: Dropout

Sorry to return to the drop out rates, but their important. Dropout rates are the amount of users who will fall out of your lead generations during the conversion process.

Knowing your dropout rates will show you which areas within your marketing funnel you need to improve. Critically speaking, this is a part of the lead nurturing stage of your lead generation marketing. This means you need to have a strong lead nurturing funnel, so that you can spot the points of drop-off where prospects are losing interest. You can improve these areas to improve the overall conversions.

Metric Three: Invalid Lead Percentage

Invalid and fraudulent leads clog up your funnels and warp your conversion figures, making them harder to understand. Working out the percentage of your leads that are fraudulent and invalid gives you a way to track your success more accurately. Plus, if you can find out which sources are providing the majority of these bad leads, then you’ll be better equipped to improve your conversions by removing the poor sources.

Metric Four: CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value)

Knowing the lifetime value of each customer is another metric you’ll need to reverse engineer. Working it out is important because it gives you a more accurate view of the profits you’re making in the long term – not just how much you’re earning from quick, easy sales.

If you can work out your CLTV, you can improve your campaigns in two ways:

1. Test new ways of increasing CLTV using cross-sell and up-sell programs
2. Identify areas in your campaign that add to, or subtract from, your CLTV, for more profitable scaling

Metric Five: Transaction CR (Conversion Rate)

We already pointed out the difference between CPA and CPL marketing Here.

One of the main differences, is that with CPA traffic, you can usually get an instant bounce rate on your offer. However, with CPL campaigns, a conversion could take up to 1 month or longer to happen.

Knowing your transaction conversion rates (CR) will give you huge insight into the quality of your leads. The best way to see this is by posting your offline call centre data back into your lead management platform, and then tracking those sales back to where they came from.

Once you’ve done this, you can create variable-based payouts to traffic sources, knowing what to cut and what to keep. Voilà! You have just increased your campaign profitability.

Keeping Your Metric Matrix Tidy

We find that the best way to stay on top of your key metrics, is to set them all up on a live display dashboard that is easily visible. This lets you closely (and constantly) monitor your campaigns, and lets you jump on opportunities to put your foot down on the accelerator or brake, when things are working or failing.

This method makes it easy to see what is working and what is not in real-time, letting you minimize cost and risk, with a bias to the upside.

If you would like to see how these metrics could be automatically calculated for all of your campaigns with our market-leading platform Databowl, then check out the banner below to view a demo right now.