Turning back the clock: Time saving tools in Lead Intelligence

Like every successful marketer, you probably wish you had a little more time in the day. We’ve been building into Lead Intelligence some excellent time-saving features so users of our lead management and analytics platform can claw back some precious minutes without affecting campaign performance or business impact.

Whether an agency, large advertiser, publisher or ad network,  as a Lead Intelligence user you will probably need to manage both broad and deep lead generation programmes across a range of channels. We’ve already automated much of the campaign set-up, management and optimisation flow on the platform to make your life easier, but when you are dealing with hundreds of suppliers across multiple campaigns, it can still be an onerous task to ensure that everything is running as it should.

Here’s a lowdown of our favourite ways Lead Intelligence can help you save even more time:

1. Custom reports
You would never run an identikit campaign, so your reporting options shouldn’t be limited either. Rather than struggle to solve problems and gain insight with fixed reports, with Lead Intelligence you can set up and run infinite* reports in just a few steps, selecting the data and metrics you want to view and more quick understanding and optimise your campaigns.

Whether you’re someone who has to report in to different stakeholders, have an unusual set of success metrics or like to slice and dice your campaign data into unique analytical views, this is a really useful time-saving, impact-raising feature.

*We should point out that we don’t recommend infinite reporting by the way! If you need some inspiration and ideas about the kind of reporting you can undertake, download this old but still relevant PDF white paper from Microsoft or this article on improving custom reports to help you identify the right reports for your needs.

2. KPI-based alerts
Instead of reading endless reports, digging into the data to check on campaign performance or wasting time worrying things are not going as they should, setting up alerts based on specific criteria saves both time – and worry! Monitoring and acting on what matters is how you will achieve the biggest uplift in both campaign and bottom line impact. So figure out what KPIs matter most to your campaign and integrate them into the heart of your optimisation efforts. You can combine them in any way you need to slice and dice the data into truly actionable intelligence that your campaigns, departments and management can use to really power performance.

If you need some help identifying the right KPIs for your business, click through to read a quick explanation here or, if you want to redeploy some of the time we’ve saved you so far, deep-dive into KPIs with this Aberdeen Group report from 2008.

3. Dashboard widgets
Remember those custom reports we mentioned earlier and how useful they were? Data is the lifeblood of all your campaigns, so we developed our enterprise widget technology late last year that allows you to create and add customise widgets to your Lead Intelligence home screen and provide instant insights on whatever data views you need most, furthermore you can share these widgets with colleagues or clients. Having nifty real-time widgets has been instantly popular with our 24/7 users who like charting key data and events as they happen so they are able to respond to these patterns as they begin to emerge.

Google launched its own version of real-time dashboard widgets in April 2013 not long after we rolled ours out and you can get a good overview of their approach here in this blog post. You can also read more about our own capabilities here on the Magnetise blog.

4. Invoicing tab
We know that many of you spend far too much time settling up with your suppliers, so we’ve added some extra features to streamline the financials for you. In the management console of Lead Intelligence, the invoicing tab will let you format and produce invoices across ALL suppliers, sites, media, advertisers and partners in the blink of an eye. No more struggling with different formats for different players in your programme, instead you can create both CSV and PDF versions for present or previous periods quicker than you can say ‘pay me please’!

Streamlining and automating this job will not only shorten your overall billing cycle, but will also help with reconciling and overall sales effectiveness.  For an in-depth look at what e-invoicing can do for you, take a look at this E-Invoicing Market Guide from The Paypers and if you’re still not convinced, this article from Campaign about the agency implications of poor payment practices is worth a read.

5. Automatic landing page optimisation
Landing pages are both brilliant – and the bane of a marketer’s existence. Done right, they are a highly effective step in the conversion flow, but with so many formats and workflows involved, it’s easy to miss a trick or ten. Creating landing pages is quick and easy in Lead Intelligence, but even better than that, optimising them works like a dream too. Simply weight impressions towards the best performing creative, form, copy and/or targeting and watch as Lead Intelligence keeps ratcheting up the results.

If you’re looking for a deep-dive into landing pages, this article covering 7 Principles from 7 years of Landing Pages, or as the author calls them, ‘post click experiences’ is a good start while those seeking creative inspiration will find a wealth of ideas and best practice examples in this post on 30 amazing landing pages.

What Lead Intelligence features and tools are you finding save the most time in your day? Is there anything else you’d like to see us develop to help you gain back some precious time? Please do add your thoughts below…