Analytics have evolved to the point where you can know your cost-per-lead (CPL) down to the keyword level. When you first start a campaign, you have no idea what your CPL for a particular ad campaign will be — you won’t know what the conversion rates are until you actually run the campaigns. Knowing the CPL at the keyword and campaign level is critical because it allows us to increase what’s working and change what’s not. In addition, our automated bidding tools can do a much better job getting your CPL down if the numbers are accurate.

Using a tag manager and analytics, we set up goals and conversions on your website to track all form submissions and other actions people take on your site. While a certain percentage of people will fill out an online form, many companies also get phone calls. Using our tracking system, we can also track every phone call generated by an online ad and report it to you along with online form submissions. So if phone calls are coming from Google or Facebook, we can report this information to you and therefore report your real CPL and adjust campaigns to achieve the CPL you desire.

Tracking all of the important actions on your site allows us to focus your spending on campaigns that are generating the optimum CPL and lead volume for your business. If you don’t know that a campaign is generating phone calls, you may decide to turn that campaign off when you should be increasing the amount spent on that campaign. Initially, you have to think of running these campaigns as “buying data” so that you can learn what campaigns are generating leads for you. Over a period of time, depending on how competitive the market is, the campaigns become optimized and your ROI and volume will increase.

If you aren’t sure what you’re paying for a lead, then you’re missing one of the most important pieces of information available with online marketing and you can’t optimize your ad spending.