B2B Conversion Funnel Tracking

How to Understand Each Paying Customer Journey and Find Out What Drives 99% of Revenue

Key Points

  • Majority of B2B businesses don't know what sources produce revenue and ROI exactly. With improved conversion funnel tracking it is possible to map each customer's journey and attribute 99% of won deals to the original marketing sources.
  • Not every lead has the same chance of becoming a paying customer. Attributing sales to leads and leads to marketing sources allows you to determine what marketing activity actually drives sales and increase RoAS up to 7x.
  • Customers can be tracked even in complex B2B funnels by utilising first-party tracking and mapping customer journey from the first ad click and landing page visit to marketing website and through to the closed won CRM deal.

This page focuses on high-touch sales funnels.

If you're using low-touch sales with automated online purchases you may be interested to read more about SaaS conversion funnels and our solutions instead.

Why B2B Conversion Funnels Are Special

B2B sales present a unique set of challenges for tracking conversions in a sales funnel. Landing pages may be on a separate domain from the main marketing website. There may be several decision makers interacting with the website and sales force independently. Furthermore, actual revenue is produced offline when a deal is marked closed won in a CRM.

Many companies with B2B sales resort to tracking sources only of leads, attempting to measure conversion to sales and revenue indirectly. It doesn't have to be this way. Sales to B2B customers can be tracked throughout the entire funnel: from the first interaction to the revenue.

"A valuable insight we've got because of using Able Customer Data Platform is that display ads aren't working [for us] at all... we've been wasting money for years on paid display ads. Before Able we'd be excited about every lead or email that came through, but after the last year we've determined that those don't convert at all. And so we've been focusing on paid search, which does have return on investment."

— Bryan Brinton, Co-Founder, Aluvii Software

B2B Conversion Funnel Stages and Mapping

Full life-cycle of an inbound B2B customer consists of the following steps:

  1. First website visit. Prospective customer visits a landing page.
  2. Interacting with website content. Customers often like to read more about the product before they convinced to contact.
  3. Sign up form. Usually, it is the first time the customer is asked to provide contact details.
  4. Interactions with the sales force. Often many calls or meetings take place before decision to acquire the product is made.
  5. Purchase. Happens offline and usually marked in CRM as a closed won deal.

In most implementations, Formsable uses a simplified three-stage conversion funnel map:

  • Page Views - when a website visitors accesses landing page or internal website page.
  • Leads - when a website visitor completes a contact or a lead form.
  • Purchases - when a deal is closed won in CRM.
Funnel Overview Screenshot
Able Customer Data Platform makes it easy to connect customer activity between systems. In the example above it tracks sources of website leads, attributes them to marketing sources, sends attributed leads to Salesforce, tracks Salesforce closed won deals and sends conversions to Google Analytics for reporting.

How to Track Sources of B2B Sales

Understanding what website visitor resulted in a sale is a major challenge in B2B sales.

Able Customer Data Platform builds a 360-degree view of each customer by tracking website visitors before they become customer. Able CDP tracking script captures:

  • UTM Parameters
  • Referrer URL
  • Ad Click Id (fbclid/gclid) and browser details for IOS 14 traffic
  • Landing Page URL

Able Customer Data Platform then starts to build a customer profile, by tracking all website activity and, most importantly, lead and sign up form submissions, recording personal information such as:

  • E-mail
  • Phone
  • Proprietary client identifiers

This allows Able CDP to associate each closed won deal with the original customer source, implement first-touch attribution and understand what marketing activity brought each customer and each dollar of revenue.

Visitor view screenshot
Complete customer view in Able Customer Data Platform, associating an 'offline' purchase with online page views and lead forms activity, which was then attributed and sent to Google Analytics as an e-commerce purchase conversion.

Where multiple domains are used in the same funnel, Able CDP is able to link activity across them as long as one of the visitor identifiers match. We recommend using Google Tag Domain Linker for this purpose.

Using Able CDP allows you to collect all this information without having to program a database for storing attribution details and associating them to leads and customers. The entire set-up is done by placing a small tracking code for tracking website visitors and leads.

Report Revenue Sources and Channel Performance

Able CDP sends customer attribution detail to CRM and extends lead records with the customer details.

Screenshot of a CRM lead with attribution details
Example of a lead sent to CRM by Able CDP. The lead record includes UTM campaign source details, landing page and referrer page URLs (when available), as well as Google Analytics Client Id.
Google Analytics User Explorer Screenshot
Google Analytics User explorer allows to locate website visitor by its Client Id stored in CRM and review each interaction, from the first visit to the purchase that was made in CRM, attributed by Able CDP and sent to Google Analytics Measurement Protocol.

Integrate Conversion Data

Able CDP uses its customer tracking data to attribute all subsequent revenue (Purchases) and other conversions to the original source.

Revenue can be sent to Able CDP using one of its built-in integrations such as Salesforce or Scoro, allowing to track closed won deals in CRM and attribute them to original website visits automatically.

It also supports tracking of custom conversions from proprietary back-office apps using web hooks, as well as upload of sales in CSV format for compatibility with legacy ERPs.

Able CDP then attributes each Purchase event to the original visitor and sends Purchase events to all standard integrations such as Google Analytics, Facebook Ads Conversions API, Google Ads API etc.

This is the most popular solution, as it allows to leverage reporting capabilities of the reporting tools you're already using. Correct first-touch attribution as implemented by CDP allows to capture of up to 24 months of LTV data attributed to the original campaign inside Google Analytics.

Implementation Example

Able CDP B2B Conversion Funnel Tracking is incredibly easy to set up:

  1. Sign up for an Able CDP account.
  2. Add lead form tracking code to the website. Able CDP Dashboard generates custom tracking code by analyzing lead forms on the website automatically.
  3. Connect Able CDP to a CRM to send attributed leads from website forms to the CRM. See example for adding attribution details to Salesforce leads. (Optional.)
  4. Connect Able CDP to a CRM to track closed won deals (for example, track Salesforce closed won deals) and to send CRM conversions to Google Analytics and ad platforms such as Facebook Ads. (Optional.)

Begin Tracking Actual Sources of Your SaaS Revenue

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