When dealing with synchronous prospects, in a shop or on a website, you often find yourself with less information than what you can get through other channels. In most cases, the context you can discover from website prospects is inherent to the current visit, except if the prospect had already visited your website before or if the person is logged on the website.

The Explicit context you can retrieve through real time web analytics includes:

• Geographic location,
• Language,
• Material (Operating system, Browser, Screen Resolution, …)
• ISP or Company.

Compared to data you can get from other channels, this is very restricted: no gender, no age bracket, and no job position; if you were to decide anything based on just this, error rate would be high. You may ask for these details during the prospect’s visit, for example when the prospect asks for a resource such as a white paper, or a newsletter subscription, but most of your visitors won’t be in this situation.

Fortunately, web analytics give you precious information about the current behaviour of your prospects, some of them being really relevant to track.

1 – Language

If you want to provide online support following your lead scoring, the prospect’s language is useful. You may want to pass the lead to someone you has skills in the prospect’s language,

2 – Geographic location

Aside from the country and time zone your prospect is in, you can infer what kind of marketing campaigns the prospect has been exposed to. Furthermore, if you are involved in a "local" business, you can filter out any visitor not in your neighbourhoods.

3 – Current Page and Time Spent on page

Some pages are critical on an e-commerce website, like the checkout page, or some product pages. A good Lead Scoring should be sensitive to the importance of the current page. Time on page is also important, as a long time spent on a product page can be significant of a high interest from the prospect.

4 – Time spent on site

The longer the better, right? Well, only if your prospects are really paying attention to your website. You may encounter visitors who have been on your website for hours but went out without stopping their browser, or who have your tab in the background or behind another application.

5 - Number of pages

Correlated with the 2 previous parameters – time on page and time on site, you have a good estimation of the activity of your prospects.

6 – Number of open tabs

Depending on the business and on the website ergonomic, number of open tabs gives you a hint of prospects’ hesitation or comparison process. Very convenient when you can see prospects with tabs opened on the same kind of product. Help them find what they want!

7 - Landing Page and Marketing Campaign

Watch in real time the impact of your marketing campaign. Online prospects coming from your sponsored link campaign or your email campaign already have something in their mind. Use the landing page & marketing campaign indication to find out what triggered their interest.

8 – Focus

Is your prospect watching your website or is your page behind other applications? Focus gives you the immediate attention of web visitors. Cross this data with time spent on page: a one hour focus on a single page is rather significant of lunch break than real interest!

9 – Referer

Where is your propect coming from? Google? You may then gather the related search terms. Blog/Forum? You can have a good hint of the specific topic. Competitor? Prospect might be comparing products, show him you’re the best!

10 - Search Terms

Gold bars! Search terms, if you can track them in your real time web analytics, shows a lot: search topic, precision of the project, localisation of the project … Some of the search terms can be added to the real time lead scoring, while sometimes it takes a human eye to detect the subtle meanings behind them.

Other parameters are of course interesting to track, but those ones are a must-have to help your sales team or customer relation team. Real time lead scoring is a real plus for online selling; your online conversion with lead scoring benefits from the fact that your online agents know about the prospects search context and behaviour on your website.