If you’re a B2B marketer, you live for leads. Sure, sales is where the rubber meets the road, but for most of those there’s a little hand-holding and nurturing before the order comes in. Users need to have confidence that the service you offer is really going to knock it outta the park for them. Their experience at these early stages is key in order for them to convert. That’s true know matter where they come from - finding you on organic search, via PPC, or from referral traffic.

Are you tracking the success of your lead gen and conversion sources and success by channel? If so, awesome for you; if not, well start now. Why? Because each channel will typically have pretty big variances in sessions and conversion rates, so understanding your most productive acquisition channels, then drilling into the underlying sources can help you optimize your efforts. Meaning, driving more, and higher converting leads!

So here’s a quick snapshot for the past several weeks of data for Dasheroo:

Here’s our 5 ‘channels’. In the next week or so, we’ll post more about exactly what each of these channels represent, because it can get a little tricky and deserves its own article. Keep an eye out!

But for now, look at that conversion rate of 8.62% for ‘referral’, yee haw!

Referral traffic is Google’s method of reporting visits that came to your site from 3rd party sites, not organic or paid ads. When someone clicks on a link to go to a new page on a different website, Google Analytics tracks the click as a referral visit to the second site. The originating site is called a “referrer” because it refers traffic from one place to the next.

So whatdya do next? Drill in, of course! Who are these awesome people sending me these obviously very relevant people that seem to really dig Dasheroo business dashboards. Here we go:

Wow, Duct Tape Marketing sends us a lot of people. Thanks John and team! But just look at that ‘ga_partner_gallery’ source. 36 new users with a whopping 35% conversion rate. Whoa. So what is that? Well, that’s our brand-spanking new listing on the Google Analytics Partners gallery. That just went up a few days ago. OK, these are all great data points, but what do you do with them? Here’s a few ideas:

• We’ll contact John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing, thank him for all those folks he sent over and see if there’s some tweaks we can make to a landing page to make those people convert even higher. And when we start an affiliate program invite him to join.
• Look at that inc.com traffic AND high conversion. Click on that link and find more detail, in this case 20 of the 21 new users came from just one article. Might wanna publish more articles like that one…
• Google Analytics Partners…I think you’ve heard of Google. Pretty sizable. May not return our calls. But, Google is sharp and they love to see highly engaged users and valued apps. So a couple takeaways in these cases; first it doesn’t hurt to highlight this and lob a targeted email into the Partners team. Get ‘featured’ and you could generate 100s if not 1,000s of new users. Second, get yerself listed on similar sites and galleries! One of the reasons the Google Anaytics Partners site is working so well is because the audience is already very targeted and predisposed to wanting a product like Dasheroo. So we’re already busily researching and applying for listings on marketplaces that cater to folks that like business metrics - whether it be social media, email marketing, surveys, CRM or other types.

Bottom line, the metrics tell the story, you just have to know where to look, how to interpret them and leverage it for your B2B success. Do it!