How to Track Customers and Revenue from SEO in CRM –

As an SEO professional, you’ve probably struggled to prove how your efforts impact your ultimate business metrics like customers and revenue.

It’s easy to install Google Analytics and see how many visitors come from organic search. You can also measure leads by setting up goal tracking on form submissions.

But getting the same attribution data into your CRM and reporting on metrics like the number of new sales opportunities generated from SEO, the volume of your pipeline, and the number of new customers has been a challenge.

Fortunately, we can offer a solution.

Read on to learn how to associate leads and customers with SEO in your company’s CRM, and how to run reports to prove the value your SEO efforts are creating (and hopefully set aside some budget). can).

Why You Need to Track Your SEO Efforts in CRM

Imagine SEO for a project management software company.

To generate leads, do SEO and use paid advertising through Google, Facebook, and similar platforms.

If you just use Google Analytics to measure your visitors and goals, your Analytics data will look like this:

If this were the only source of insight (website visitors and prospects), then Facebook and Google Ads would appear superior to their SEO efforts.

With that data, you could be spending most of your marketing budget on paid channels.

But what if you could see a complete picture of the number of customers and revenue generated?

Looking at the numbers above, we can see that SEO efforts far outstrip paid advertising for the following reasons:

• Acquired more customers from SEO (25) than from Google and Facebook ads combined (19).
• Lead-to-customer conversion rates are higher for SEO (83%) than for Google and Facebook ads combined (17.5% for Facebook ads and 30% for Google ads).
• Average SEO customer value is $1,800 per customer, higher than Google Ads ($1,500) and Facebook Ads ($1,142).
• The customer acquisition cost of SEO is $200, lower than Google Ads ($416) and Facebook Ads ($714).

Tracking the performance of your marketing campaigns based on the number of customers acquired and revenue generated gives you a complete picture of that performance and allows you to allocate resources accordingly.

In this case, you can make a good business case for how important SEO is to your business, and potentially get more budget and resources to help you grow.

How to use CRM to track customers and revenue from SEO

Now that you understand the importance of tracking customers and revenue from SEO, let’s see how to do it.

It boils down to two steps: making sure your CRM has the data you need and running the right reports.

1. Check the data

Make sure you have attribution data about each lead and customer in your CRM (source channel, campaign, ad group, etc.).

Most CRM systems have custom fields that store contact information and sales opportunities, but do you track how customers first discovered your business?

The easiest way to do this is to add hidden fields to your website’s lead generation forms and write your attribute information into those fields.

That way, you’ll get the data along with the lead’s name, email address, phone number, etc. and send it directly to your CRM.

Most popular form building tools have the ability to add hidden fields to forms and facilitate drag and drop.

2. Run reports using CRM or analytics tools

Now that you have the correct demographic information for each customer in your CRM, you can use it to run reports.

The quickest and easiest way to do this is with your CRM’s built-in reporting tools.

Depending on how far along they are, you should be able to report on metrics like number of leads from SEO, number of sales opportunities, number of customers, amount of revenue generated.

Or, if you’re looking for more advanced analytics, you can export your data to a spreadsheet or connect your CRM to third-party analytics tools like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, or Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio). increase.

This allows you to run more advanced reports that can answer questions such as:

• How many leads are you getting from your SEO efforts on your product pages?
• Which search engine generates the most customers?
• Which individual blog posts are generating the most leads?
• How many customers will you get from your content hub pages?

5 Metrics Every SEO Professional Should Track

Now that you know how to get your attribution data into your CRM and run reports, here are some reporting ideas that can help prove the value of your SEO efforts.

Number of leads from SEO vs.Other channels

As you can see, this report shows the value SEO provides in that it brings more leads to your business than paid channels like Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

SEO vs number of customers.Other channels

The example chart above shows the number of customers generated from various marketing channels.

Not only does this show that SEO drives the majority of customers for your business, it also helps you calculate your lead-to-customer conversion rate.

Leads from organic searches often convert higher down the funnel than leads from sources like Facebook ads. These leads often have a problem that your product/service solves and are actively considering a purchase.

Revenue from SEO by landing page group

The example chart above shows the amount of revenue generated from customers driven by SEO efforts, broken down by landing page group (that is, grouping of pages based on URL subfolders).

With this report, you can see what types of content are generating customers and revenue from search engines, helping you identify what more you need to create.

Similarly, if you see changes in your customer count and revenue due to SEO, this report can help identify what happened. Does it mean that the ranking of the homepage has increased?

Or is it the blog posts and webinars you’ve been working so hard to create that are starting to get noticed?

Average deal size from SEO vs SEO.Other channels

The example graph shows the average deal size of customers acquired via SEO versus customers acquired through other channels.

This, combined with the number of customers coming from SEO and the conversion rate, helps model potential budget increases.

Create a spreadsheet model showing the increase in number of visitors you get from a larger budget, model your funnel using conversion rates and average deal sizes, and calculate the expected increase in revenue from it. can be shown. these changes.

Showing expected revenue growth is much more compelling than showing expected changes in visitors, especially for financial managers who think in dollars and cents rather than impressions, clicks and visitors.

SEO vs time to finish.Other channels

The example chart shows the average time to close for customers via SEO and customers from other channels.

This helps in several ways.

First, leads from SEO tend to be in buying mode, so sales opportunities from SEO often close faster than sales from channels such as Facebook ads.

This is a good data point to convince management of the value of SEO.

Similarly, if you are modeling how a potential budget increase in SEO will affect your final numbers such as customers or revenue, use this time to close your metrics and advocate Understand when changes in your business start impacting your bottom line.

This will prevent the model from showing an increase in revenue prematurely and will prevent the finance team from retracting the budget if the numbers are not met.

wrap up

If you’ve struggled in the past to report on how your SEO efforts are impacting key business metrics like customers and revenue, then you’ve felt the pain of failing to show the true value of your SEO. have you ever

However, if you can start tracking the source of all your leads in your organization’s CRM, you will not only be able to pinpoint the number of customers and revenue your SEO is generating, but you will also be able to pinpoint whether an increase in budget or a change in strategy will result in increased revenue. Model how you drive growth.

And if you can show how much revenue these changes will generate, you’re more likely to get additional budget approval!

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