B2B Lead Generation with Google Analytics

We all know that B2B sales lead generation has a long road from lead to sales conversion, and that the optimal solution for reducing sales leads timelines is to find the warmest leads possible to convert.

Being digital marketers we like to create these warm leads for the sales team via a myriad of online tactics: PPC, email marketing, conversation marketing, social media marketing, content development etc.

The goal of our tactical approach to generating leads usually involves the sales prospect visiting your website or landing page, where they have the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of your product and contact you for more information if interested. Once the prospect has made contact, we then follow up with the sales team making sure the lead has been added to their sales funnel. Happy with our conversion we go back to tweaking our PPC campaigns, sales copy and multivariate testing the landing pages.

What if you could gain a better understanding of the 70%-90% visitors who didn’t make contact and turn them into warm sales leads?

Enter Google Analytics. You probably already use analytics to track your websites visitors, page views, average time on site etc already, but let’s dig a little deeper and look into one particular underused feature – service providers. Service Providers enables us to see which organisations are visiting your website. Let’s create a basic report that will provide a list of companies who are potentially interested in your product.

Basic GA Service Provider Report

Log into Google Analytics, select Visitors > Network Properties > Service Providers.

You will be presented with a list of services providers – anything from cable companies to organisations, each with their own identifiable ‘Company Name’ IP address.

At first glance it doesn’t look too impressive, but try adding this quick filter:

Filter Exclude: “isp|dsl|broadband|ip|cable|telecom|network”

You will be now presented with a list of company names who visited your site. Select ‘Pages/Visit’ to provide their level of interest and select the current day in the date range.

At this point we could export this data to excel for the sales team to use, but let’s look at making it even more useful first.

Advanced Google Analytics B2B Lead Generation Reporting

For advanced lead generation reporting, we are going to leverage analytics goals. Using the goals feature we are able to pre-qualify our leads to gain a deeper understanding of their requirements/actions. To do this visit ‘Analytics Settings’, then ‘Edit’ the profile you want to set up goals for. For this goal we are going to track when a user visits the contact page (but does not fill out the form) and combine it with our ‘service providers’ report. Call the Goal ‘Thinking of Making Contact’.

Select Goal Type as ‘URL Destination’ and for Goal URL enter your contact page URL.

It will take Google a couple of hours to start reporting back goals to your dashboard so be patient and go and enjoy some nice green tea.

Tea finished – let’s revisit the ‘Service Providers’ page in Analytics and add the exclusion filter (same as above). Select Advanced Filter > New Condition > Select the goal we created earlier.

This filter presents us with a list of companies who viewed your product and contact page. We can combine this filter with other goals – watched ‘Widget A’ demo video, downloaded a whitepaper, read 3 blog posts on how to use ‘Widget A’ etc.

Be creative and create goals that give you talking points with your prospect, then depending on the size of the business give them a call. If a small to medium enterprise (SME) appears in our reports we give them a call and are usually able to locate the person who visited our site (usually in marketing). We also connect with them on Twitter, share their blog posts etc. If it’s a big organisation who appears in your service provider report it’s a little more difficult to connect directly with the person who was browsing your services. One technique we use is to head over to Linkedin and cultivate connections with senior managers, CEOs and managing partners at the organisation and look for previous conversations in the social space they may of had related to your services and take it from there.

The last part of our B2B lead generation reporting with Google Analytics is to automate. Setup a scheduled email report and send it daily to the sales team.

These warm lead generation Google Analytics reports are only scratching the surface of what is possible in terms of value you can create for your sales team/business.

• From using jQuery and analytics events to track contact form abandonment you can pinpoint the exact field your sales prospect decided not to contact you – add this knowledge with the name of their organisation and you have pain points for your sales calls.
• Exporting the lead generation reports and connecting them to Techcrunch’s Crunchbase Company API to get a deeper understanding of the company, background, market value etc for the sales person.

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About Sean McColgan

Co-Founder & Digital Strategist at Acquisition Engine. Into Search, Social Computing, Viral Loops, and Awesome Content Development. Aspiring Digital Nomad.