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What Is Lead Scoring and How You Can Do It In GTM

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Lead scoring is an imperfect science, and one that will depend on where and who you work with. To “score” a lead means to assign it some value that can be used for evaluation of the lead’s quality later. For example, you could qualify or score a lead based on the lead’s budget. If you are a design agency whose projects typically cost $5K-$10K and the client has a budget of over $10k, then that would be a great lead, while if they had less than $1k, they wouldn’t be able to afford to work with you, and it would be a bad lead. You could also evaluate the lead based on the lead’s title. For example, if you’ve determined that leads close at a higher rate if you’re dealing with a VP or C-Level executive, you could score the lead based on who submitted it. If it’s a VP of Sales, then it’s a Hot lead, while a Junior Analyst might be a Cold lead.

Lead scoring is hard because every business is different and there are no industry standards to score your leads against; you have to use your own in-house data and experience to determine what is a Cold, Warm, or Hot (or Bad, Medium, or Good, or whatever other scoring rubric you’d like to use) lead. Before you start scoring leads, talk to as many people on your sales team as you can to determine what makes a lead Hot or Cold, and what information they use to qualify leads. This type of intel is what will help you decide which metrics to use to score a lead.

With that in mind, if you have the data and can qualify your past leads by a particular characteristic of that lead, then you can significantly improve your analysis of your leads using Google Tag Manager (GTM)  and Google Analytics.

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No. Firefox Isn’t Going to Decimate Your Google Analytics Data.

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I’ve been hearing rumblings this week to the extent of “Firefox hates marketers and is coming for all of our data!”. This post, in particular, caught my attention, so the post that follows is my attempt to clear things up and, hopefully, lay some fears to rest.

In Mozilla’s announcement, they convey that “For new users who install and download Firefox for the first time, Enhanced Tracking Protection will automatically be set on by default as part of the ‘Standard’ setting in the browser and will block known ‘third-party tracking cookies’” according to the Disconnect list.”

Sounds like a scary development (pun intended) for people who rely on web analytics data for their careers and livelihoods. Before we go any further, let’s take a minute to break down browser cookies and the critical differences between first and third-party cookies.

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Values Spotlight: Integrity

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SEO can be something of a “black box.” It’s certainly much more widely accepted as a marketing practice than it was when I was first starting out, but even though more business owners understand that SEO is something they need to be doing, they still may not understand what, exactly, SEO entails.

In some ways, this is a good thing for us as SEOs – we’re in possession of an in-demand skill set that not a lot of people possess. Can anybody say “job security”? But in other ways, SEO’s esoteric nature makes it easy for unscrupulous SEO providers to hide the fact that they’re not providing real value. In a world where business owners understand that they need SEO, but may not have much (or any) idea of what good SEO entails or what results they should be getting, there’s a lot of room for advantage to be taken.

To add to that, there are a number of “black hat” SEO techniques that still work disturbingly well even today. These tactics can gain success for a business, but also run the risk that the website will be penalized by Google if it detects the use of those tactics. Since black hat tactics aren’t illegal, just risky, there’s really nothing stopping SEO practitioners from using them, often without their clients’ awareness or a full understanding of the risks involved. Nothing, that is, except the individual practitioners’ sense of ethics and integrity.

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How To Get Your Images in a Featured Snippet

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An UpBuild client recently asked why the image in Google featured snippets are often provided by a different website than the one from which the text content is taken. This has been the case for quite some time now and it’s fair to say that while a page may provide the most useful answer, the same page might not convey the most useful visual.

There is a system in place for images; we just (as is the case with most things Google does) don’t know exactly what it is, and it appears to be different than the one for text. SEOs talk a lot about how to structure text for featured snippets – I wanted to see if we can definitively learn how to get an image included in featured snippets too.

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Filed Under: SEO

Uncover Link Spam with Moz Spam Score

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We’re all familiar with internet “spam”. We see it in pop-up ads, in our email inboxes, and on websites and apps. Consumers normally think of spam in terms of unsolicited marketing emails, but search engines face their own type of spam that is equally detrimental to the user’s experience.

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