Usually the longer the tail on a dog, the slower it gets wagged. Click on the animated collie image to see its long tail move slower than a cocker spaniel's would. This principle is graphically demonstrated in Jacob Nielsen's 9/6/05 Alertbox article entitled "The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying".
While 85 % of the one million clicks in a Rimm-Kaufman Group Study that were analyzed were from B2C web sites, only 15 % were from B2B sites. So, in the 4 % of clicks that converted, approximately 80 % of those 41,377 conversions (to mostly "a sale") happened within 3 days of the initial visit. I think Jacob Nielsen would agree with me that if the study were done with 85 % B2B clicks, the "tail" (the last 20 % in that study) would be even slower, longer and certainly greater than 20 % of the total!
This is the point that I made in my post entitled iProspect's "Outsourced SEO & ROI Study". The longer the buying cycle (from B2B or B2C), the more difficult it is to track offline sales. But, the B2B cycle is usually longer. Of course, if either kind of buyer comes back to the web site and buys online after an initial "contact action" is taken, then there is less need to get feedback from anyone except the person in charge of a good web analytics, tracking software system.
The key is to track every "contact action" that is taken by the user-buyer. This could be a "Live Chat" customer service set up, or an e-mail sent from a form set up within the site that requests, more information of any kind, catalogs-brochures be mailed, a sales rep or engineer to follow up, upcoming sale notifications, a request for quote, or even just a subscription to a monthly newsletter. This way, when that slow, long tail kicks in, there will be less of a need for human memory and feedback to play an important role in tracking the conversion of leads to sales.
How important do you believe it is to track all leads and sales?
Animated image courtesy of www.artie.com.
Comments