Marketers have become addicted to certainty. Yet, the industry is inherently uncertain and cannot be predicted. But lead tracking can help marketers shift the probability in their favour and understand the rhythm of the buyers.

While this oversimplified definition might entice you, it shouldn’t. Lead tracking is anything but simple; it is observing the whole movement of a segment and trying to make sense of it. Luckily, CRM tools and martech stacks will help you go a long way, but they won’t be able to make sense of what truly matters.

Lead tracking is only as good as the team observing these leads and making their hypothesis of what’s working. Though this is a good feedback loop, the more leads of the same segment you track, the more you understand behavior, and when you understand behavior, your tracking becomes smoother.

That’s all easier said than done. Marketers have tried for decades to capture and codify buyer behavior, but it seems elusive. However, there are three tools that can help you.

Here’s why your teams need to track leads and how marketing mix modelling, multi-touch attribution, and GA4 can shift the probability to your side.

Lead tracking is observing behavior across touchpoints.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Before we get started, your sales and marketing teams need to define what a lead is and the qualification criteria.

Not all leads should be tracked; more data isn’t always a good thing because it can skew predictions and increase the uncertainty factor.

The leads you define will decide whether this is a wild goose chase or a worthy endeavor. No marketing leader or C-suite is going to enjoy a goose chase.

Marketing is, at its root, uncertain. Marketing teams have always known what the buyers’ past behavior was, but never what it will be, and they make choices based on the past, hoping people will exhibit similar behaviors.

Lead tracking helps the team contextualize data from past behavior.

For example-

1. What touchpoint was most lucrative?
2. Where did most of the leads come from?
3. What messaging was more useful, i.e., which ones got the most CTR and open rates?

Lead tracking answers, or helps marketing teams observe such metrics and make informed decisions.

But by their nature, these metrics cannot be fixed. They are ever-changing. For example, during 2023s Black Friday, a store had a lot of customers, enough to overwhelm staff, and the following year, perhaps not so many.

What changed?

Hardly anyone could answer such questions, and they pervade the industry.

Lead tracking is segmenting leads that exhibit shared behavior and observing their relationship with the touchpoints. Lead tracking starts from the initial touchpoint to the drop-off or conversion.

Lead tracking can only be done through software.

1. You can have leads fill out forms like the famous ‘where did you come from?’ form.
2. Through UTM links
3. CRMs
4. GA4

Each is a unique way of tracking leads. The combination provides a holistic view of the lead and helps you attribute it.

Which leads to the next step, which is MMM, MTA, and tracking the lead using GA4 to optimize your channels.

What is MMM?

Marketing Mix Modelling, or MMM, is a statistical model that uses historical data to identify the most effective marketing channels.

MMM is used to find which channel provides the intended ROI and which channels need to be ramped down. It also shows potential for emerging channels that you may use in the future. It is a mathematical model and is completely probabilistic.

The model uses regression analysis. Which is essentially looking at various independent variables and one dependent variable, and mapping them out to create a relationship.

For example, if you spend $1000 on Google Ads, you get 350 sales. The 350 sales are the dependent variable, and your Google Ad spend is the independent variable. Since you can use multiple variables, you can calculate different channels based on buyer behavior and even seasonality.

MMM is currently the best tool available for marketing teams to make sense of their spend, invest in the correct channels, and explain the cost of marketing to the CEO and CFO as an investment, giving tangible results in return.

What is MTA?

The complex buying journey means that buyers are interacting with many touchpoints before making a decision.

It has become nigh-impossible to attribute sales to a single touchpoint. Multi-touch attribution is a marketing model that bypasses this problem and attributes sales to multiple touchpoints by giving them an aggregate or percentage.

MTA is deterministic and provides definitive proof of which channels contributed to the sale; it shows the entire buyer journey and is the reason why lead tracking is so crucial.

Lead tracking strengthens MTA, and MTA gives a clearer picture of the lead. They are positive feedback loops.

Here’s a resource to help you understand this with more depth- https://lifesight.io/blog/multi-touch-attribution-mta/

Test Incrementality

Incrementality testing is something you must do to assess the performance of individual campaigns. Basically, it strengthens the findings of MMM and MTA, giving you a clear picture of each campaign you have run.

Here’s a resource to understand the concept better: https://business.google.com/in/think/measurement/incrementality-testing/

But essentially, incrementality testing is about running a specific marketing campaign on a group and watching its effect on sales vs a group who has not been subjected to that campaign.

It gives you insight into whether your marketing campaigns are affecting sales. It will also prove your MMM and MTA findings.

Phase 1: Foundation Setup (Based on MMM insights)

Step 1: Configure Attribution Models

1. Navigate to Advertising → Attribution → Attribution models.
2. Start with GA4’s data-driven attribution model, which assigns credit based on how each ad interaction changes the estimated key event probability.
3. Set your attribution model in Attribution Settings – this change is retroactive and will adjust historical data.

Step 2: Set Up Key Events Based on MMM Channel Insights

1. Log in to the GA4 admin section and select your property
2. Create events for the high-performing channels that MMM identified
3. Use unique transaction IDs and trigger events right after successful actions to avoid double-counting

Phase 2: MTA-Informed Custom Events

Step 3: Create Touchpoint Sequence Events

1. Click Admin → Events → Create Event
2. Use enhanced measurement events for precise user actions without complex implementation
3. Set up events for the specific touchpoint combinations MTA revealed as high-converting

Step 4: Set Up Attribution Path Tracking

1. Use GA4’s two main attribution reports, Model Comparison and Conversion Paths, to see how different marketing channels lead to conversions.
2. Access these under Advertising → Attribution → Model Comparison

Phase 3: Validation and Optimization Loop

Step 5: Create Validation Events

1. Set up custom events that capture both MMM strategic patterns and MTA tactical sequences
2. Monitor new events in the Custom events table – they’ll appear in Recent events once Analytics processes them

Step 6: Regular Review Process

1. Use Model Comparison reports to validate MMM insights.
2. Monitor Conversion Paths to confirm MTA patterns.
3. Leverage GA4’s enhanced cross-device tracking and machine learning algorithms for more accurate attribution across devices and sessions.

Lead tracking is about data. Bad quality tracking will derail your entire campaign.

The piece must have made it clear that lead tracking is a process that improves your marketing accuracy. However, marketing teams often get caught up in how to do the process rather than doing it right.

The amount of data marketers have today is no joke. And while dashboards show what is most necessary, only the users can judge which data is worth tracking.

Through precision, MTA, MMM, and incrementality testing should help you find the accurate data to track. But that requires historic data and active campaigns.

Before that starts, you must, through instinct and market research, create the definition of a lead and only input data that seems to matter to your specific market. Many fall into the trap of telling you what to do instead of giving insight.

And that is: The data that matters to your organization is specific to you.

You must be ruthless with what you remove from your tracking. Probabilistic and deterministic values can quickly go askew if the data sets aren’t accurate.

Even a 0.1% difference could mean the end of accuracy.

This includes: –

1. A lead qualification process
2. Lead nurturing and behavioral analysis.
3. Scoring leads based on behavior that has been pre-set by your teams.
4. And finding bias in your findings.

This is an ongoing process.

The organizational buy-in

This all leads to the organizational buy-in. Marketing leaders have great ideas but get little support from the rest of the C-suite.

Even though the data marketing brings to the table is a goldmine for the CFO, CMOs often don’t translate that value well.

Why?

Because the CFO needs tangibility. And marketing, which deals with human behavior, cannot give definitive proof. But lead tracking and the strategy it enables can help CFOs and CEOs align with marketing and see definitive evidence of growth.

Even though marketing gets the brunt of it all. It has made a difference. But tracking was always a problem for marketing.

The correct method of lead tracking can end this loop. It will help you directly tie marketing efforts to the bottom line and prepare a financial report for the stakeholders.

Yet, many teams are failing to do so, and that’s because they are unwilling to accept that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. The framework might be the same, but the results will vary based on your market position.

Your data must reflect your unique place in the market and what matters to you. Industry standards are not definitive proof of success.

You can create one of your own.