How? Tracking Leads/Sales - Never done this type of work.

So there is a local business that I'm partnering with where I've been given complete control over the entire website/social marketing/emailing campaigns/SEO and just about everything you do when taking a business online.

I've worked out a deal where every sale and new client I bring in through the website I get a percentage, the average life span of the clients is over 5 years and they pay weekly/bi-weekly/monthly for services this company does.

The competition is non-existent so I know that I can make out better via this "commission based" payment system than a flat fee for all my services.

My problem:

I've never setup a system quite like this, I have a few ideas for tracking online inquires (remember, I have full access to domain email address's) and anything purchased online I'll obviously be seeing those come through too.

But I know that my system is just something I have only thought about, I'm looking for help to see if you guys can give me some ideas for complete tracking of leads and sales generated through the site.

Thanks for any help/suggestions in advance!

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steelballs said:

salesforce.com

Check it out awesome tool for volume business

Click to expand...

Thanks having a look right now.

That's an interesting scenario and after 30 seconds of thought, all the solutions I have basically come down to the honesty of your client.

You could have some sort of backend where all communications originating from the website go to the backend, where your client can accept/reject a client and you will see that. But who's to say your client won't just phone his clients and not even take a second look at the backend, so you'll never know if the sale went through?

You could monitor e-mails but again, you can't monitor phone calls so this is easily circumventable.

You could also set a cookie on visitors who request info through the site, then come back later to make an online payment. These of course are your referrals, but this doesn't take into account that the lead could have been generated offline by your client and the visitor is someone your client talked to, so the referral isn't yours even though the cookie would mark it as yours.

A surefire way is to move all payments and everything online so you can track each and every sale and your client is forced to use an online system, but I'm sure this would cause a huge hassle for your client.

Another way is to allow a "how did you hear about us?" option when requesting information. Any options such as Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Twitter/Online ads/etc. would be credited to you and you can set a cookie for these. All others, such as flyer/face-to-face/etc. would not be credited and would not receive a cookie.

For cookieless browsers, you can store the IP in a database as a fallback measure, though this causes issues if the user requests info on their smartphone, then switches to a computer, etc. but the same can be said about the cookie. You can set a cookie, store the IP, store the e-mail address, and store the phone number, and this should be fairly accurate when tracking your referrals.

None of this accounts for offline transactions, though. You will have to rely on your client for this.

artizhay said:

That's an interesting scenario and after 30 seconds of thought, all the solutions I have basically come down to the honesty of your client.

Click to expand...

This is the conclusion I came to and the reason for this thread.

artizhay said:

Another way is to allow a "how did you hear about us?" option when requesting information. Any options such as Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Twitter/Online ads/etc. would be credited to you and you can set a cookie for these.

Click to expand...

This is a great idea! I'm also going to be setting up forwarding accounts on all the emails so I can "watch" when inquires come in for the service side of the business. As for sales, I'm the one in charge of all that so monitoring that is actually the easy part.

The only thing I'm still uneasy about is that potential clients that don't want to email for service based inquires are simply going to call and there is no way to track them since I can't setup a track-able number, the client wants to keep their number. This is a risk without a doubt, however, with the skills that I'm bringing if need be, I will focus more on funneling traffic to purchasing products then bring in local leads. Clients happy about online sales and I'm happy that I can track them all.

Great feedback +rep and thanks given!