I’m thrilled to include a guest post from Aaron Wittersheim who is the Chief Operating Officer at Straight North, an Internet marketing agency specializing in SEO, PPC and web design. Within my post “Four Trends Marketers Shouldn’t Ignore” I included information that content marketing and native growth will eventually outpace display and search.  I connected with Aaron and learned more about lead validation which is the process from separating sales leads from non-sales inquires and his team brought to light a very interesting lead validation study.  The presentation and forward from Aaron is below.

“You’ve spent a lot of time fine-tuning your lead generation website into a high-performance machine. However, if you’re not incorporating lead validation into your efforts, you’re driving without a roadmap. You might get where you want to go, but it will be almost completely by accident.

Lead validation is essential because measuring your site’s performance by the number of conversions alone is not enough. Here at Straight North, a Chicago SEO expert firm, we’ve spent a lot of time reviewing hundreds of thousands of conversions, and found that conversions aren’t sales leads nearly half of the time.

That means half of conversions are things such as job applications or incomplete form submissions, which shouldn’t be counted (but Google analytics numbers can trick you into counting). Lead validation also takes phone calls into consideration, something Google doesn’t track (but can have a big impact on the success of your campaign).

If you’re still on the fence about incorporating lead validation into your lead generation campaign, consider the information in the following presentation. We’ve complied some of the most compelling arguments for lead validation, illustrating how critical it can be for the success of any Internet marketing effort. You’ve put a lot of work into your lead generation website, so make sure it doesn’t go to waste.”

– Aaron Wittersheim is the Chief Operating Officer at Straight North,