© The Confusion Clinic. The Confusion Clinic is a trading name of Rear End PPC Ltd. By Rob Drummond No part of this document may be republished or reproduced in any form without the written permission. Republishing is not always a problem, as long as the report content and format is not modified in any way. Please ask first. If you make any changes as a result of reading this document you need to accept full responsibility for your actions. Results are not guaranteed. You can contact us at: Rear End PPC Ltd 105 White Lane Sheffield South Yorkshire S12 3GE Email: info@confusionclinic.com Website: www.confusionclinic.com Published in the United Kingdom, which means we use UK spelling.

There is a free email series that accompanies this guide Please note there is a free email series to complement this report. The email series provides day by day guidance and tips on how to implement the steps outlined in this report. You can also email us if you get stuck, and we will do our best to help out. Sign up at https://www.rear­end­ppc.com/infusionsoft­lead­tracking­guide if you have not already done so.

Finally - A Straightforward, Plain English Guide To Lead Tracking In Infusionsoft We love Infusionsoft for many reasons. We love the marketing automation. We love purchase triggers. We love lead scoring. What we don’t love so much is the lead tracking. As far as Infusionsoft is concerned, lead tracking is about knowing where a customer originally found your business. It is easy to under­estimate the number of places where your business can touch a potential customer. First, you have all the obvious places ­ Google, Facebook LinkedIn and so on. Most of these platforms have a paid and organic element, so you will normally want to know whether someone has come from your paid or organic (free) efforts. If Google and Facebook isn’t your thing maybe you use direct mail. Maybe you are one of the handful of companies in the world who successfully use Twitter. Maybe you pick up the phone and call people. People can find your business in a range of less obvious ways too. Conversations at networking meetings. An email that was forwarded to them by a friend. Links on your email footers and letterheads. Lead tracking can get pretty complicated because a customer may come into contact with your business multiple times before they buy. Let’s say you sell shoes. A new prospect does a search for ‘size 9 mens shoes’, and clicks on one of your AdWords ads. Before leaving, our prospect signs­up for your email newsletter. Seven days later he receives an email from you about wedding shoes. He comes back to the site but does not buy. Two weeks later he clicks on one of your remarketing ads on Facebook, and finally buys a pair of shoes. Where do you assign credit in all of that?

Fortunately Infusionsoft has made things nice and simple for you, because by default in Infusionsoft you can only store where a contact originally came from. You do this in the ‘lead source’ field on the Infusionsoft contact record.

In our shoe example above our lead source would be Google, because that is where our shoe­buyer originally stumbled across your business. You should still be interested in knowing that all the other steps happened, but the place to map that out is in Google Analytics, not Infusionsoft. Inside Infusionsoft we are only interested in knowing where a customer originally came from. The lead source field is reasonably permanent; once it has been set it can only be changed manually. If our new customer fills in a new enquiry form on the website the information in the lead source field would be preserved. You can think of it as a permanent record of where a contact originally came from. This report covers 6 steps to getting your lead tracking with Infusionsoft into shape. It is a ‘one size fits all’ so you might have to adapt my advice slightly. For the more complicated steps I’ve included videos, which you can forward to your technical team if you like. If you are the business owner you need a high level understanding of how the tracking works. But it might not be a good use of your time to implement everything yourself. If you are the business owner you may want to scan this report once, then pass it on to your favourite techie to implement. We can also do the implementation for a fixed fee ­ details at www.confusionclinic.com/leadtracking. The core of this process is to use Google Analytics correctly to store where each visitor to your site came from. That is where we go first.

Step 1: Get Google Analytics Set-up Correctly Most companies seem to think that having Google Analytics ‘set up correctly’ is simply a case of installing the standard Analytics javascript tag. If this is all you do Analytics will group your visits into ‘Direct visits’, ‘Referrals’, and ‘Organic’.

You may also see ‘Paid Search’ and ‘Social’. The big problem with this default setup is ‘direct visits’. The pure definition of a ‘direct visit’ is a visitor who enters the URL of your website directly into their browser’s address bar. This relies on them having either an exceedingly good memory, or on them having the URL of your website bookmarked in their browser. Both cases are possible, but they are unlikely to account for 33% of your website traffic. (The screenshot above is a real screenshot from a client’s Google Analytics account). Google also assigns a visit as ‘direct’ when they simply do not know where a visitor came from. A visitor can appear in Analytics to have come direct when in fact they entered the web address from your business card. In this case credit should be given to your business card as the medium, but by default Google Analytics will lump the visit under ‘direct’. If you run pay per click ads on Bing, LinkedIn or Facebook then by default these visits will appear as ‘direct’ in your Analytics stats too. Whenever I open a Google Analytics account and see a huge proportion of traffic in the direct segment I know immediately that there is a tracking problem. Most visits that are reported as ‘direct’ are because the link the visitor arrived on was never tagged with campaign parameters. Which in English means Google Analytics doesn’t know where they came from. Google Analytics is good, but it isn’t psychic.

The answer is to use something called the ‘URL Link Builder’. The URL Link Builder allows you to create a link to your website for use with your Facebook campaigns, LinkedIn campaigns, direct mail campaigns, telemarketing campaigns, business cards, letterheads, and whatever other marketing you may be doing. The challenge is to create a process where you actually remember to use the link generator. It only takes a second to tag a link; simply enter the page you are sending traffic to, the campaign name, medium and traffic source.

Watch Video I do recommend where possible using consistent source and medium names. If you are running a promotion on LinkedIn, then name the source each time as ‘LinkedIn’. If you use ‘Linked In’ then Google will consider ‘LinkedIn’ and ‘Linked In’ as two separate traffic sources because you spelt them differently. The names you use are also case sensitive. All paid ads should have the medium ‘cpc’. If you are doing free (unpaid) promotion on Facebook, LinkedIn and so on set the medium to ‘organic’. Other than cpc and organic you can set any campaign names, source names and medium names you like, so it helps to be consistent. When you have finished tagging your link it should look something like this (I’ve bolded the tagging parts): https://www.confusionclinic.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=Ad2&utm_campaign=Campaign1

If you are using offline media such as direct mail you will need to be a little creative. The back of my business card for example looks like this:

www.rear­end­ppc.com/hello redirects to https://www.rear­end­ppc.com/free­guides?utm_source=Met%20in%20person&utm_medium=Business%20Card&utm_campaign=Business%20Card. Source = Met in person Medium = Business Card Campaign ­ Business Card Using the URL builder consistently is a training requirement for your in­house team, or the people who prepare your marketing. I find it helpful to maintain a spreadsheet of all the tracking links we have created. Doing this allows me to see in a single place all the sources, mediums and campaigns that have been used, and make sure we are being consistent. You can get the same template we use at T#080 ­ Lead source tracking links. Tagging links does not have to be especially complicated, but you do need to make sure it happens. Note: if you are using Google AdWords you need to use a ‘tracking template’ in AdWords. Please see this video.

Summary of this section:

Make sure Google Analytics is set up on your website Make sure you are tagging all the links to your website used in your marketing collateral

(print and digital) using Google’s URL builder Consider setting up a process to keep track of the links you have tagged

Step 2: Hijack Google Analytics Information For Your Lead Source Field If you are using Infusionsoft hosted landing pages, order forms and so on Infusionsoft will make a stab at the lead source all by itself. You can also add the Infusionsoft tracking code to your web pages so that any Infusionsoft forms you add to your website will also pull in the lead source. The problem is it just doesn’t work very well. If a lead source is set automatically Infusionsoft will only assign the referring domain as the lead source. If a visitor comes from a Google organic search, the referring domain (and therefore the lead source) will be Google.com. If a visitor comes from a paid Google AdWords ad, the referring domain will also be Google.com. This is a problem because now you can no longer distinguish between paid and organic clicks. Setting the lead source in this way also assumes that there was a referring website. If the visitor came from direct mail and there was no referring website you will just see your app name in the lead source field.

This is of no use to you whatsoever. As long as you have tagged your links correctly (see step 1) Google Analytics knows that the visitor came from direct mail. So what we need to do here is hijack the Google Analytics information and dump it in the lead source field, IF the lead source field is empty. When I was researching for this report I looked at a few ways of doing this. As long as you are using Infusionsoft’s own web forms the thing to do is set up a free account with Itracker360 (https://itracker360.com). The free version of Itracker360 will populate the lead source field with visitor source information from Google Analytics.

So rather than the lead source saying ‘fi212.infusionsoft.com’ it might say ‘Direct mail ­ Business cards ­ Business cards’. This is the source, the medium and the campaign name separated by hyphens. Suddenly this is now extremely useful because we can record marketing expenses against the lead source ‘Direct mail ­ Business cards ­ Business cards’, which will give you a true return on investment for all your different marketing sources. If I know I have spent £100 this month on networking and have spent 2 hours in networking meetings I can add the cost of this into Infusionsoft to see how profitable my networking efforts have been. But, I am getting ahead of myself. You need to get itracker360 set up first. There is information on the itracker360 website on the technical aspects of setting this up, so set up your account and pass the setup instructions on to your technical team. Itracker360 setup requires that you add a script to your web pages as well as make some changes inside your Infusionsoft app. So whoever sets this up for you should be familiar with both your website and Infusionsoft. If you require help this is something we can do ­details at www.confusionclinic.com/leadtracking.

Summary of step 2

Set up a free account with Itracker360, and follow the setup instructions provided by Itracker

A technical note on forms I know many Infusionsoft customers choose not to use Infusionsoft’s web forms, for a number of reasons. The Itracker360 tracking will also work if you use a system like Lead Pages or Thrive Themes where you paste in the autoresponder code. Just make sure the itracker code is on your Lead Pages landing pages. If you use something like Gravity Forms (my favourite Wordpress forms plugin) the Itracker360 tracking will only work with a paid Itracker360 account. If you use pass the contact information into Infusionsoft using something like Zapier then the Itracker360 tracking will not work.

You need to decide how badly you want the tracking information compared to the clunkiness of using Infusionsoft hosted forms.

Step 3: Adding in inbound phone call information This step is optional, but highly recommended if your business accepts inbound phone calls from new customers. First, we need to clear something up. If a customer makes a phone call to your business, the lead source usually is not ‘phone call’. You should only set the lead source as ‘phone call’ if you have no better information on where the caller got your number. The phone call is just the capture mechanism. You would not set ‘web form’ as the lead source for an enquiry because it tells you little about where the visitor came from. The same goes for phone calls. I number of paid systems exist to help you track where your phone calls are coming from. I don’t claim to have evaluated all of them, but the system we use is called Infinity Tracking. Infinity Tracking works in both the UK and the US.

Watch Video If your business relies on inbound phone calls and you are not taking proactive steps to figure out where those phone calls came from you are to an extent flying blind. As long as you tagged your links correctly in step 1 Infinity Tracking will pull in this information and tell you where each of the phone calls to your business actually came from, down to ad creative and keyword level. Yes, Google AdWords has it’s own free call tracking solution, but it only works for AdWords traffic. If you want to track where all your phone calls are coming from across all your marketing efforts you need to invest in a paid solution.

If your business takes a reasonable volume of inbound calls I do believe this is a worthwhile investment. If you implement this process correctly and discover that Twitter genuinely does not deliver customers to your business (either online sales or phone calls) then you can cut it out of your marketing efforts. Infinity Tracking is only one of the solutions that will provide you with this sort of information, but I can only make recommendations from first hand experience. Please contact us to discuss call tracking options in more detail.

Step 4 - Upload Your Marketing Expenses As your automatically generated lead sources start to build up you will see them in Infusionsoft under Marketing > Lead Generation > Edit/View Lead Sources.

You can now click on a lead source, select the ‘expenses’ tab and click ‘add expense’.

Once a month I suggest you set a calendar reminder or project management task to come in and add your expenses for the previous month. Over time you are likely to end up with a large number of lead sources as new customers find you through different campaigns and different keywords. If you use Itracker360 one solution to this is to use their ‘Leadsource Organization Feature’. The Itracker Leadsource Organisation Feature allows you to group a number of lead sources together so you can then apply a single expense to them in Infusionsoft.

Step 5: Set a reminder to review your marketing ROI (Return On Investment) reports The whole point of putting yourself through the steps above is to make your marketing ROI reporting accurate and meaningful. It would be a huge shame if you went to all this trouble and then ignored the ROI reports! If you or someone else is responsible for the monthly marketing reports at your business then have them take account of the ROI report as part of that process. If looking through Return On Investment numbers leaves you a little cold, have a think about all the money you are spending with Google and Facebook. Wouldn’t it be nice to know which keywords lead to your most profitable customers? Oh wait ­ you know that now! On some of my client accounts I set up a marketing ROI report right on the dashboard.

An example of a dashboard report. In this case the client has not been adding marketing expenses (step 4), so the ROI and cost per customer is zero.

Before I started the Confusion Clinic I ran a small pay per click agency. I can tell you from my experience managing Google AdWords accounts that most companies do not truly know how profitable their ad spend is down to keyword level. You can give yourself a huge advantage by having access to that information. Immediately you now have the ability to cut out your marketing efforts that are not working, and focus on the ones that bring in the customers. If you need help implementing the advice in this report you can read more about our fixed fee support at www.confusionclinic.com/leadtracking.

Step 6: (Optional but recommended) Learn to use Google Analytics. Lead tracking in Infusionsoft is mostly about figuring out where your customers originally found your business. In reality there will often be many steps in the middle. Maybe you have 7 or 10 interaction points between a prospective customer finding your business and eventually sending you a purchase order. In Infusionsoft you can only track the original lead source, but you can track all the steps in between in Google Analytics. Google Analytics is smart enough to give credit to all the steps that happened in the middle. I don’t have space to go into Analytics in depth here, but if your website has a reasonable about of data (say more than 10,000 visits a month) it is worth somebody at your company taking the time to really learn Google Analytics properly. Have them take Google’s free Analytics certification, and get him or her to tell you interesting things once a month about the things people get up to on your website. You may be surprised at what you learn.

Next Steps We work with Infusionsoft customers to help them build more effective marketing nurture campaigns. As discussed in this report, we also spend a significant amount of time linking everything together. If you’re new to Infusionsoft and would like to learn more about whether the system is right for you please go to www.confusionclinic.com/demo. If you’re a current Infusionsoft user and would like to discuss getting help with your campaigns please go to www.confusionclinic.com/support. If you decide you would like help implementing the steps in this report please go to www.confusionclinic.com/leadtracking. Feel free to email me (robd@confusionclinic.com) with any questions or feedback – even just to let me know what you thought of this report. It would be great to hear from you.