This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to use Google Analytics to generate more leads on your website.
Understand lead generation
A lead is someone who shows interest in your products or services and is therefore likely to convert into a paying customer. For example, someone who fills out a form on your website or submits your survey in their inbox is likely interested in whatever it is you sell. Lead generation is the process of finding people who are likely to be interested in your business.
One common way to generate more leads is to add a form on your website that collects some information about the potential customer. The information you collect could then be used to convert the potential customer into a paying customer.
Add a lead generation form
A lead generation form is any form you use to collect information from a potential customer. The form could be a contact form, a demo request form, or a newsletter subscription form.
Where you place the form and the information you require in the form can impact the number of customers who start and submit the form. Using an analytics solution like Google Analytics will enable you to measure how many customers reach the form, submit the form, and convert into paying customers.
In this tutorial, we'll start with the following lead-generation form, and then throughout the tutorial, we'll look at ways to measure the impact of the form, how many customers fill out the form, and how we can measure changes we make to the form.
Measure website visitors
When you first add a lead-generation form to your website, you should measure how many people visit your website, reach the form, fill out the form, and submit the form. You can measure all of these interactions through Google Analytics.
To measure any interactions on your website, you first have to create a Google Analytics account. Then you need to add a small piece of JavaScript measurement code to each page on your site. Every time a user visits a page, the measurement code will collect anonymous information about how that user interacted with the page.
Simply by adding the measurement code to each page on your site, you can answer the first question: How many people visited my website? The answer to this question will help you figure out how many people drop off at each step in the lead generation process.
Measure form views
The next step is to measure the number of people who see the form so you can calculate the percentage of total website visitors who make it to the form. The more people who see the form, the more likely you are to generate a lead. If the percentage is low, you may need to decide on another place to put the form or modify the button to the form.
In this example, the button to the form is along the top of the home page. Clicking the button takes the website visitor to a page with the lead-generation form. When you add the measurement code to each page of your website, Google Analytics will also tell you how many people visit each page. You can use this information to figure out the percentage of visitors who see the form.
Information about the pages people view and what they do on those pages is captured using events. Events are additional pieces of measurement code that you can add to your site to measure specific user interactions.
Fortunately, some events are collected automatically, including the page_view event, which tells you when people view a page and which page they viewed. You can use information from the page_view event to calculate how many people visit the home page and how many visit the form page.
Measure form interactions
You now want to know how many people start the form and then how many people complete the form. The percentage of people who start the form and submit the form will help you identify any issues with the form, such as too many required questions or unexpected errors when filling out the form.
Like the page_view event, Google Analytics measures form interactions automatically through the form_start and form_submit events. The first event tells you how many people started the form, and the second event tells you how many people submitted the form.