Everyone wants leads.
If you’ve ever worked in a marketing team, you’ll know that leads are often seen as the ultimate measure of content performance. While performance marketing can come with its own hangups, there’s no denying that a well-planned, evidence-based approach to content and lead generation matters. After all, generating leads is the end goal.
The first step to improving that process is understanding exactly how your content contributes to it.
Working backwards
One of the most direct ways to see how content drives leads is to work backwards from the conversions themselves.
At Kooba, we track this by setting up a Google Analytics event for each time a user submits our project planner form. We then review the pages visited before that event. If we see a blog post or case study in that path, we can treat it as high-performing content.
This approach lets us trace the path each successful lead took before converting. It is an effective way to spot what is working, but it has limitations. It only captures users who complete the conversion, missing those who drop off along the way. For businesses relying on a small number of high-value leads, the sample size for analysis can also be too small to give a full picture.
Identifying the weakest link
Enter drop-off rate analysis.
This is a more comprehensive assessment of your user journey from landing page to checkout, and measures where users leave your website. This allows a UX designer to identify the specific pages and content which triggered high drop-offs, and target these with focused remediations.
One way to think of this is as a chain, which can only be strengthened by finding and replacing the weakest link. Improvements elsewhere will have little impact if crucial content remains unusable or ineffective.
Lead attribution - What does success actually look like?
When running these analyses, it is important to define what “success” really means for each page.
Not every page’s job is to directly convert leads. For example, a product page might be designed to showcase your catalogue, provide use cases, and explain your value proposition. It should be judged on its ability to move users to the next relevant stage, such as a pricing or lead-generation page, rather than on final conversions alone.
Constantly optimising each page for lead-generation can quickly prove counterproductive for this reason. It’s far more important to let each section of your site do what it is meant to do, and only prioritise actual lead-generation within your end-of-funnel content.
Fixing the funnel - Design expertise and content strategy
Once you have a handle on understanding where your content is and isn’t working, you can begin making improvements. The obvious place to start is a qualitative analysis. Maybe certain topics are performing well across your blog, or case studies with certain imagery are bringing in great business. Once you find these patterns within your content, you can adjust your content strategy accordingly, producing more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.
Design teams can be important here too. It may be that certain content converts effectively, but doesn’t get adequate traffic. By featuring this more prominently elsewhere across your site, a UX team can drive up views, and help this quality work bring in more leads.
Fixing the funnel - A/B testing
Of course, sometimes it's not so simple. When there’s no obvious flaws in your content strategy or overall design, we need to reach for more quantitative tools. The primary method here is A/B testing, which can compare the performance of two separate forms of content in order to understand which performs better amongst real users. This is not without flaws, but as long as you clearly measure success (and clearly understand which users you are testing content on), it will yield highly-actionable insights that will improve content performance.
Conclusion
Improving lead generation is rarely about a single fix. It is about understanding the role each piece of content plays, identifying weak points in the user journey, and applying targeted solutions. By combining data-driven analysis with smart design choices and continuous testing, you can strengthen your funnel, make the most of high-performing content, and ultimately bring in more of the right leads.
If you’d like to get started on improving your own content strategy, just get in touch with our specialist UX team today.
