Analytics uses the concept of goals to help evaluate the actions users take when visiting a website.

Every company is looking to grow and generate more leads. This is an ongoing struggle for a large percentage of companies as they look to remain competitive in their industry.

The Marketing and Sales Departments work endlessly on this, but it seems like it is just never enough.

The answer to growing your business and generating more leads is within your Google Analytics.

Goals can include email signups, eCommerce purchases, PDF downloads and more.

So you might create a goal that tracks the users who sign up for your email list.

You can also specify a sequence of actions, known as a goal funnel, which can be useful in analyzing the flow of traffic towards an ultimate objective.

Here are 6 things you can do with Google Analytics to help sharpen your lead generation.

#1 Set up Goal Conversion Funnels

Analytics allows you to determine if there are any snags in your checkout or conversion process.

One of the best parts of this feature is the funnel visualization option which makes the data even easier to digest.

For example, if you have a series of 3 pages in your lead generation process.

After setting up a goal funnel to track the movement from page to page, you can view if visitors entered the funnel properly, and then if any dropped off significantly after they reached the sign-up form.

You can then clearly identify where your sales funnel may have leakages.

#2 View Revenue Data at the Keyword Level

This is another feature that can be incredibly helpful, especially for eCommerce advertisers.

With Analytics reporting, you can track sales and revenue data at the keyword level.

It also gives you the ability to link your AdWords keywords and determine exactly which keywords are the most profitable for your business.

You could analyze your keywords based on revenue and optimize against that information.

Having access to the data enables you to determine your most profitable keywords and optimize them accordingly, which can ultimately improve the overall value of your conversions.

#3. Set up Multi-Channel Funnels

This helps you improve your conversions/leads because you can see how channels interact along your conversion paths.

Channels can include paid and organic searches for all search engines, referral sites, affiliates, social networks, email newsletters and more.

By looking at this data, you may find repeated patterns that can provide insights on how to improve conversions and revenue across several marketing channels.

Start by looking at the top conversion paths report in order to determine which sequences of channel interactions generated the highest number of sales and revenue for your business.

Analytics also provides information about assisted conversions as well, which can help attribute additional value to PPC.

#4 Do your Leads Convert into Customers?

If you are analyzing lead generation, that is the key question.

With cohort analysis, we

You can look at a group of leads and see how many converted into customers one day out, two days out, etc.

By using cohort analysis and various measurements (ie Transactions Metric, User Retention) you can get a good idea of how many leads convert.

For example, if a lead is still coming back to your website one or two months after their first visit, then they are certainly a regular visitor and probably a customer.

An example of this would be by using User Retention to analyze the lead generation for a B2B web-based business. With this leads are identified by signing up for a free trial offer. The free trial lasts for two weeks.

You can then tell if a lead (a free trial user) has become a customer if they are continuing to come back to the website one or two months after trial signup. If they’re continuing to come back, they must have converted to a paid subscription.

#5 Create a Segment for Analyzing Leads

The first thing we want to do is create a segment for identifying leads.

For this, you could use the goal that tracks when users sign up for the free trial, ie New Account – Trial Goal.

If you then apply this segment to the Cohort Analysis report and adjust the cohort size to month and date range to last three months.

This analysis will tell you how many leads are still coming back to your website up to 3 months ago.

If you were running a 14-day free trial and now 3 months later these visitors are returning then they are most likely to be customers.

#6 Analyzing Conversion Rates by Channel

You can segment the leads by Acquisition Channel to see where the best conversion rates are.

You may want to filter your leads by channel such as organic search, paid search, referrals or whatever are your main acquisition channels

Then you are able to see what percentage of customers by channel converted to customers.

This analysis will allow you to determine which channel is performing best for your business. You then can make a decision on how best to deploy your marketing resources.

These 6 ways will give you a good insight into the performance of your business. You can then develop them further to gain a better understanding. But for most businesses, this will give you a good insight.