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.