Track Customers and Revenue from SEO in your CRM: Explained

As an SEO expert, you may have encountered difficulties in illustrating how your endeavors impact significant business metrics, such as revenue and customer acquisition. While it’s simple to employ Google Analytics to observe organic search traffic and track the number of leads using Goal Tracking on form submissions, it has historically been challenging to integrate this attribution data into your CRM and generate reports on metrics like new sales opportunities, pipeline, and customer acquisition resulting from SEO.

Fortunately, we have a solution that can help you overcome this obstacle. Keep reading to discover how you can attribute leads and customers to SEO in your organization’s CRM, generate reports that showcase the value created by your SEO efforts, and perhaps even secure additional budget.

Why tracking SEO efforts with a CRM

Suppose you work in SEO for a company that offers project management software.

To drive lead generation, you employ a combination of SEO and paid advertising on platforms such as Google and Facebook.

In the absence of additional measurement tools, your analytics data, based on Google Analytics alone, might resemble the following:

Relying solely on this information about website visitors and leads, you may conclude that your Google and Facebook Ads are delivering better results compared to your SEO strategies.

Consequently, you might be tempted to allocate a substantial chunk of your marketing budget towards these paid channels.

But what if you could obtain a more holistic perspective of the total customers and revenue generated?

After scrutinizing the aforementioned data, it becomes evident that your SEO endeavors are surpassing your paid advertising for the following reasons:

• The total number of customers acquired through SEO (25) exceeds the combined number of customers acquired through Google Ads and Facebook Ads (19).
• The conversion rate from lead to customer is higher for SEO at 83%, compared to the combined conversion rate of 17.5% for Facebook Ads and 30% for Google Ads.
• The average customer value is higher for SEO at $1,800 per customer, in contrast to Google Ads ($1,500) and Facebook Ads ($1,142).
• The customer acquisition cost is lower for SEO at $200, as opposed to Google Ads ($416) and Facebook Ads ($714).

Keeping tabs on the efficacy of your marketing campaigns concerning customer acquisition and revenue generation can equip you with a comprehensive comprehension of their performance, allowing you to fine-tune your resource allocation accordingly.

In this case, a compelling argument could be put forth for the importance of SEO to the business, which could potentially result in obtaining extra budget and resources to spur growth.

How to track Customers & Revenue from SEO with a CRM

After acknowledging the importance of tracking customer and revenue data from SEO, let’s delve into the process of accomplishing this.

The process can be simplified into two main steps: Ensuring that the required data is present in your CRM system and running the suitable reports.

• Data Checking

To ensure that your CRM system comprises attribution data for every lead and customer, you must include data about the source channel, campaign, ad group, and so forth.

Although most CRM systems have customized fields for storing contact information and sales opportunities, they may not track how the customers initially discovered your business.

To tackle this, you can add concealed fields to your website’s lead generation forms and incorporate the attribution data in these fields. This allows the data to be captured alongside the lead’s contact details, such as their name, email address, and phone number, and sent directly to your CRM system.

Popular form-building tools generally provide the feature to add hidden fields to forms, which is often an easy drag-and-drop process.

After integrating the concealed fields into the forms, you can leverage tools like Attributer.io (Disclosure: Attributer.io is a product/service that I am not affiliated with) to identify the lead source and enter the information into the hidden fields. This data will automatically transfer to your CRM system alongside each form submission.

• Run reports with CRM or Analytics Tools

By possessing the appropriate attribution data for each customer record in your CRM system, you can leverage this information to create reports.

One straightforward and effective method is to utilize your CRM’s built-in reporting tools. Depending on the system’s complexity, you can generate reports for various metrics, such as the number of leads generated from SEO, the number of sales opportunities, the number of customers, the revenue earned, and more.

If you require more extensive analytics, you can either export the data to a spreadsheet or integrate your CRM with third-party analytics platforms such as Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, or Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio).

This approach enables you to create more advanced reports that can address queries like:

• How many leads do we get from our SEO efforts on our product pages?
• Which search engines are generating the most customers?
• Which individual blog posts are generating the most leads?
• How many customers do we get from our content hub pages?

5 Metrics SEO Professionals should Track

Now that you have learned how to obtain attribution data in your CRM and generate reports, here are some report suggestions to consider in order to demonstrate the significance of your SEO endeavors.

Number of Leads from SEO Vs. Other Channels

The presented graph displays the number of customers generated via different marketing channels, revealing that SEO is the driving force behind the majority of the customers. Moreover, this data can be used to calculate the conversion rate from leads to customers.

It is commonly observed that leads acquired from organic search have a higher conversion rate in comparison to those obtained from Facebook Ads. This is because such leads typically face a problem that the product or service is intended to solve and are actively seeking to make a purchase.

Revenue from SEO by Landing Page group

The provided graph depicts the revenue generated by customers that have been acquired through your SEO efforts, categorized based on the landing page group (i.e., pages grouped according to their subfolder in the URL).

This report provides valuable insights into the types of content that are driving customer acquisition and revenue from search engines. It can also aid in identifying content areas that require more focus.

Furthermore, if you notice any fluctuations in the revenue and number of customers generated from SEO, this report can assist you in identifying the cause. For example, did your homepage receive a ranking boost, or are your regularly published blog posts and webinars starting to gain more attention?

Average deal size from SEO Vs. Other Channels

The presented graph illustrates the average deal size of customers obtained through SEO compared to other channels. This data, when combined with the number of customers and conversion rates from SEO, can help in forecasting potential budget increases.

To do this, you can create a spreadsheet model that shows the increase in website visitors resulting from the augmented budget. By utilizing the conversion rates and average deal size, you can simulate the impact through the funnel and project the anticipated revenue growth resulting from these changes.

Demonstrating the predicted revenue growth is much more compelling than just showing the expected increase in website visitors, especially for financial decision-makers who think in terms of monetary gains and losses rather than clicks, impressions, and visitors.

Time to Close from SEO Vs. Other Channels

The presented graph demonstrates the average time taken to close sales for customers originating from SEO as compared to those from other channels.

This data is beneficial for multiple reasons. Firstly, it is widely observed that sales opportunities from SEO tend to have a shorter sales cycle than those from channels such as Facebook Ads, as leads from SEO are typically in the purchasing phase. This is a valuable metric to convince management of the significance of SEO.

Moreover, if you are creating a model to assess the impact of potential budget increases in SEO on bottom-line metrics such as customers and revenue, utilizing the time-to-close metric can aid in determining when the recommended changes will start to influence revenue. This can ensure that your model does not forecast revenue increases too early and can prevent finance teams from cutting back the budget if the expected numbers are not achieved.

Wrap up

Reporting on how SEO affects important business metrics such as customers and revenue can be challenging. This can lead to frustration when you cannot show the real value of SEO. However, if you track the source of each lead in your CRM, you can accurately demonstrate how much revenue and how many customers SEO generates. Additionally, you can create precise models to forecast how budget increases or changes in strategy will drive growth. If you can present the expected revenue from these changes, you are more likely to secure additional budget.

To thrive in the current era of eCommerce and digital marketing, every business must prioritize SEO. If you want to expand your business by attracting more leads and driving sales, it’s essential to hire an SEO specialist for prompt outcomes. By reading this article, you’ll discover the advantages of investing in SEO as a business owner.