If done right, online forms are an effective way to turn a website visitor into a lead. However, most companies don’t put much thought into the information they ask for or how many fields they require a person to fill out.

As a rule of thumb, the more fields you have prospects fill out, the lower the lead generation rate. However, the quality of the leads tends to be higher. So if you ask for a name, email address, and phone number you may get more leads but the quality of leads will be lower than if you also ask for information like their title, number of employees, industry, annual revenue, etc.

Which approach is best? That depends on your audience, the product or service you’re trying to sell, and your sales cycle. If you don’t know what works, experiment with different forms and landing pages and find out. The one thing about conversion is that that a good analytics tool will give you an unbiased report of what worked and what didn’t. (And if you don’t have one, you’ll want to check out our conversion-centric analytics tool.) The more you know about your audience and their behavior, the easier it is to optimize your website and increase your overall conversion rates.

Analytics has always focused on basic reporting such as number of visitors, page views, and referring URLs. While that’s information’s important, they don’t show how effective your website is in turning visitors into leads. By understanding your site’s conversion metrics, you can make better decisions regarding marketing efforts and find ways to better tweak your conversion rates – allowing you to get the most bang for your marketing and website dollars.

Fusion provides you with all the standard data that other analytics tools provide but does it from a conversion-centric view. One of its many features is a dashboard where you can see at a glance not only how Sapha lead generation tools are converting, but also the conversion rate of your entire website.

Read more about Fusion here.

Just a reminder that our webinar “Live Landing Page Review: Value Proposition and Form Quality” will be held today from 2-3 p.m. Eastern, 11-12 p.m. Pacific.

If you haven’t already, you can register here.

One of the challenges organizations have is finding ways to keep visitors on their websites longer. The last thing most websites want to do is send users off to a different site because there’s a chance that they won’t come back. Studies have shown that the longer a visitor hangs around, the more likely they are to enter your sales pipeline.

One of the enhancements we’ve made to the HookTour is the ability to embed and launch the HookTour from your own website. This means you can place the tour in the most effective location directly on your website or landing page. It also entices visitors to click and stay around longer, learn more about your product or service, and have a better chance of entering your sales pipeline.

Combined with our conversion-centric analytics, you can see for yourself just how much more effective embedding the tour on your site is.

Other improvements have been made to the HookTour too. Check back Thursday for more.

As mentioned in Tuesday’s post, it’s difficult to guage the effectiveness of PPC and other online adverting and marketing efforts if you have no idea whether or not visitors from these campaigns are entering your sales pipeline.

One of the new features of our HookTour is the ability to integrate with Google AdWords and other ad sever systems (MSN, Yahoo!, etc.) for closed-loop marketing conversion tracking. Instead of pointing your campaigns to a static, text-based landing page, you can now send prospects straight to a page energized by your HookTour, tracking them from impression to conversion.

But why stop at ad campaign integration? All leads from your HookTour can be sent in real time to any CRM system, including Salesforce, Sugar CRM, Eloqua, and others. We’ve also enhanced client-side and server-side data pass-through options so that you can integrate the tour with your website, affiliate systems, and other custom data-collection engines for more robust call-to-action handling and tracking.

Installing the HookTour and Sapha tracking code on your website is as simple as copy and paste.  Embedding the tour right in  one of your webpages, or creating a link that will open the tour in a modal, stylized window is as easy as designating which HTML tag you want affected — the Sapha system does the rest!

Just think. Prospects will go from an ad, to your HookTour to your sales pipeline all in one smooth process. And, you’ll have the data to see  how effective your marketing efforts really are.

Marketing and sales professionals are realizing that PPC ads, SEO, and other methods of online advertising and promotion are worthless unless you’re able to calculate the ROI from your investment. Though it’s easy to track how many visitors came to your site from different marketing campaigns, it’s difficult to know whether or not these visitors enter your sales pipeline and what factors contributed to their conversion.

On January 26 Sapha is launching a conversion-centric analytics platform. One of its many features is a dashboard where you can see at a glance not only how Sapha tools are converting, but also the conversion rate of your entire website. By understanding your site’s conversion metrics, you can make better decisions regarding marketing efforts and see how website updates affect conversion rates – allowing you to get the most bang for your marketing and website dollars.

More than just a conversion overview, our conversion-centric analytics provides granular reporting so you can learn from the behavior of each visitor that comes to your site. What path did they take before becoming a lead? What information and documents have they gathered from your site? How did they interact with your HookTour? The answers to these questions will soon be available!

If you think it sounds cool, just wait until you see it reporting data from your website.

In 13 days, you can.

If you were to ask the head of your organization’s marketing department what your company’s website lead generation rate was for 2008, would he or she be able to answer you? 

More than likely you’d get a roundabout response or maybe an “I’ll have to get back to you” answer.

Let’s face it. Most organizations don’t know how many of their site visitors are converting into leads or sales. Even with sophisticated analytics tools, making sense out of the data to track conversion rates is extremely difficult and time consuming, if not impossible to perform.

Thankfully in just a few weeks a new tool will be available to Sapha clients that can give then the conversion reporting that most marketers only dream about.

January 26, Sapha will launch a new conversion-centric application platform and reporting system, the Sapha Conversion Suite. This new conversion suite allows Sapha clients to see online lead generation results from our tools and their website’s overall conversion rates at a glance. Additionally, clients will be able to get granular reporting that can track the behavior of individual visitors and advertising campaigns from the time the visitor enters the site to when they leave.

Check back often as we’ll be discussing some of these features in more detail and how these reports will help you increase your overall website lead conversion rates so that you will know if you’re getting the most from your online marketing dollars.

Until our next update, go ask someone in your marketing department if they can tell you your organization’s website lead generation rate.

Webinar: Live Landing Page Review: Value Proposition and Form Quality
Wednesday, January 21, 2009, 2-3 p.m. Eastern, 11-12 p.m. Pacific

Register now!

Do you have questions regarding YOUR landing pages? How would you like to have one of your landing pages reviewed by landing page experts for FREE?
 
Join Sapha as MarketingSherpa’s Optimization Manager and MarketingExperiments’ Business Unit Manager perform live analysis on selections of your landing page submissions with a focus on:
 
• Clear expression of your Value Proposition
• Registration forms that Convert

Register here now!
 
Enter the your URL of your landing page when you register and your may be evaluated during the live teleseminar.
 
Presented by:
• Anthony Valcarcel, Marketing Optimization Manager, MarketingSherpa
• Boris Grinkot, Business Unit Manager, MarketingExperiments