If you are a restaurant that generates tons of leads, you probably want to know where the leads came from.
Sure, you probably ran an ad or had some viral social post that got you all those leads.
But how do you know if they became a lead directly from clicking on your ad or post, or if they clicked on the ad and post, then went somewhere else and became lead later.
Today I am going to show you how you can know exactly which traffic source your leads came from.
Have Email Marketing Software & Landing Page in Place (Prerequisites)
If you are reading this you should already have an email marketing software and a landing page in place.
This is a screenshot of the tracking I have in place with Mailchimp.
As you can see, I have data on which site the lead came from, which ad they came from, and even which picture I used for the ad (volcano vs grill picture).
Configuring Your Email Marketing Software
Your email marketing software should have a way to add custom fields.
If you are not sure what custom fields are, they are basically new pieces of data that you can add to each contact in your email marketing software or CRM.
It’s very much like adding a column to Excel or Google Sheets.
In your email marketing software, you want to add the following fields:
- UTM_SOURCE
- UTM_MEDIUM
- UTM_CAMPAIGN
- UTM_CONTENT
- UTM_TERM
- INITIAL REFERRER
- LAST REFERRER
- INITIAL LANDING
- VISITS
Your custom fields should end up looking like this:
After you have these custom fields implemented, your email marketing software should be ready to accept this data from your landing page now.
Configuring Your Landing Page
Your landing page should have a form that can accept data and send it off to your email marketing software.
Afterall, the data that ends up in your email marketing software needs to come from somewhere!
For my landing pages, I used WordPress as my platform and Thrive Architect as my page builder.
With WordPress, it’s very easy to add code to your website so that it can capture all this extra information we need.
If you are using WordPress too, all you need to do is add this one simple piece of code to the footer of your website.
If you don’t know how to add code to your WordPress footer yet, here’s how you can easily do it.
Add a plugin named “Insert Headers & Footers” then install and activate.
After you install and activate, you can find the editing screen under Settings > Insert Headers & Footers.
In the Footer area, paste this code:
<script src=”https://d12ue6f2329cfl.cloudfront.net/resources/utm_form-1.1.0.min.js” async></script>
If you use Google Tag Manager, you can add this as a script as well.
What exactly happens when I have my email marketing and landing page configured?
When you have both your email marketing software and landing page configured, this is what happens as users start to visit your site:
- When they enter your site from a referral domain such as Facebook, their URL will automatically append a “?utm_campaign=facebook”
- If they don’t have any ad blocking or software, this stays in the URL until they visit your landing page with your lead form
- When they submit information to the lead form, the lead form automatically inputs “facebook” into the UTM_CAMPAIGN hidden field that you have.
- When the lead enters into your email marketing system, it will show “facebook” under the UTM_CAMPAIGN column.
So, now you can see exactly where your leads come from and even what other attributes they may have based on what you set for the UTM parameters.
Now that you have this extra data with your leads, what are you going to do with it?
Comment below with what your ideas are for using this newfound data.