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Salesforce Web-to-Lead Forms — Are There Better Alternatives?
Salesforce web-to-lead forms are an out of the box solution for marketers to track lead source. But are they enough? We explore the limitations of web-to-lead forms and how you can plug the gap.
When it comes to customer relationship management, Salesforce reigns supreme.
Its powerful platform offers a plethora of features to streamline operations, personalise customer experiences, and drive business growth.
One such feature, web-to-lead forms, has been a staple for many businesses.
But is it truly the best option for capturing leads?
Let’s dive into the pros and cons of Salesforce’s web-to-lead forms and explore some alternatives.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
💡 Get attribution for forms, live chat and phone calls
While web-to-lead forms allow you to create and enrich leads in Salesforce with marketing source data, they’re not perfect. They don’t consider live chat or phone calls, which are also a huge opportunity for businesses. With Ruler, you can track all of your website visitors, regardless of how they interact with your business. Ruler will then send all of this data to Salesforce, so you can have a complete view of your leads, customers and their marketing sources.
Book a demo to see how Ruler sends attribution data to Salesforce
Web-to-lead is a process you can apply to your website forms that allows marketers to automatically push form submissions on their website into their Salesforce CRM.
They automatically capture visitor information and store it directly into Salesforce.
As a default, Salesforce provides the following lead sources:
Web-to-lead on your website forms automatically assign their leads under the ‘web’ category.
While you can create new lead source types for your picklist, these cannot be accurately attributed by Salesforce itself. To get an accurate lead source, you would need to integrate your CRM with an attribution tool.
Take Ruler Analytics, for example.
Ruler is a marketing attribution tool that can track all of your website visitors and marketing interactions, and then attribute the lead source to the channel, keyword, ad and landing page that was most influential in the conversion.
More on Ruler later, first let’s look at how web-to-lead forms work in Salesforce.
You can easily create and implement Salesforce web-to-lead forms on your website, by using the following steps.
Important Note
Salesforce web-to-lead forms can capture a variety of data, depending on the fields that are included in the form. By default, Salesforce web-to-lead forms capture the following data:
Contact Information: This includes the lead’s name, email address, phone number, and company name.
Website interaction data: This includes the lead’s IP address, browser type, and referring URL.
Marketing source data: This includes the marketing channel that the lead came from, such as a website, email, or social media.
For the best results, it’s advisable to seek assistance from a developer or someone with coding experience to help implement your code.
Don’t get us wrong, being able to automatically push your leads from your website to your Salesforce CRM is a great step.
But there are a few key issues with how web-to-lead works. Let’s discuss them one by one:
A lot of marketers rely on hidden fields in their web forms to pass UTM data into Salesforce. This method works, but it has its limitations.
For starters, these hidden fields usually only capture the UTMs from the last touchpoint in the customer journey.
That’s great if your lead converts on the first visit, but not so much if they’ve interacted with multiple campaigns before making a decision.
You’re essentially ignoring the earlier touchpoints that might have played a crucial role in guiding them down the funnel.
Another downside? UTMs only tell you about leads who clicked on a tracked link.
That means if someone finds you through organic search, social media, or a referral, and doesn’t hit a UTM-tagged link before converting, you’re flying blind.
Further complicating the situation, UTMs are fickle.
They can easily be lost if a visitor clicks on a link and then navigates to another page without filling out the form.
So, if they bounce around your site before converting, the valuable UTM data would disappear.
While Salesforce’s web-to-lead forms are a powerful tool for capturing and managing leads generated through your website, they have a significant limitation: they only consider leads that have converted on your website through form fills.
This is evident in the name itself.
While this is perfectly fine if all your leads come via form fills, it’s important to consider other channels through which leads might enter your sales funnel.
For instance, in the B2B industry, a significant portion of leads may come through phone calls, emails, or even referrals.
Web-to-lead forms alone cannot capture these leads, potentially leading to incomplete data and missed opportunities.
How can you get more out of your web-to-lead data? We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: marketing attribution is the answer.
Related: Best marketing attribution tools to integrate into your stack
With a marketing attribution tool, you can accurately determine which channels, campaigns, ads and even keywords are impacting revenue.
Let’s revisit Ruler Analytics. With Ruler in place, you can get eyes on that anonymous website data we talked about before.
Here’s how it works.
Users anonymously visit your website. Ruler users first-party data to track what content they engage with and what influenced that session.
Every time users return, Ruler will harvest that data and collect it against one single user.
When that user converts, whether that’s via form, call or live chat, Ruler will fire all of the marketing data held on them over to your CRM. Plus, you’ll be able to view their full customer journey in your Ruler report.
Related: How to track every customer touchpoint with Ruler Analytics
As the users continue to engage with you, their customer journey will grow in Ruler.
Finally, when they close into a sale, Ruler will scrape the revenue data inputted into Salesforce and send it out to the relevant marketing tools.
You’ll be able to send closed sale data to tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Business Manager, Google Ads and more.
This data will be accurately attributed to the relevant channels, campaigns, ads and keywords where you can see exactly how much revenue each has contributed to.
Not every visitor will click on your site and fill in a form.
A lead may see your LinkedIn ad but not interact with it. Three days later, they may visit your website directly and convert into a lead.
Web-to-lead forms and traditional click attribution wouldn’t be able to track this interaction, as there is no click.
The lead would be attributed to direct traffic, even though the LinkedIn ad likely played a key role in the customer journey.
There are two solutions you can use to sidestep this common conundrum.
The first is self-reported attribution.
This involves asking leads how they heard about your business after they convert.
It can be done through surveys, polls, or by adding a “how did you hear about us” field to your web forms.
The second option is marketing mix modeling.
MMM is a statistical technique that uses historical data to estimate the impact of all marketing touchpoints on sales, including those that are difficult to measure, such as ad views, TV, radio, and word-of-mouth.
Ruler offers MMM alongside its multi-touch attribution.
This gives marketers a better view of the impact of clicks and ad views on revenue and allows them identify the point of diminishing returns for each channel.
We have a full guide on MMM and its impact on the future of marketing measurement if you want to learn more.
Want to get more insights into your marketing impact? Finding that web-to-lead just isn’t pulling enough data through?
While it’s a popular method of capturing leads and pushing them to Salesforce, you’re missing data. By integrating a tool like Ruler Analytics into your stack, you can get a better idea of your full customer journeys and view closed revenue against channels, campaigns and even keywords.
Book a demo of Ruler Analytics to see exactly how it can supercharge the data you currently have in Salesforce.
