3 Advanced B2B Lead Generation Strategies: AI, GA4 and Session Recordings

There are so many ways to generate a B2B lead. From cold outreach and warm introductions, paid search and organic social, anything might work.

But before you get overwhelmed with options, keep this in mind: There may be visitors on your site right now, as you read this sentence. Your next potential lead is actually on your homepage, at this very moment, scanning through text, looking for an answer …then giving up and hitting the back button.

That’s why we should first prioritize the website experience. Regardless of the traffic source, regardless of content strategy, conversion optimization is the fastest path to more B2B leads. Because you already have a visitor.

Today we are sharing three advanced approaches to B2B lead generation. We break them down in detail and include input from B2B experts. But first, we’ll summarize it all in this brief video:

The strategies themselves aren’t advanced but the tools we’ll use definitely go beyond the basics. We’ll use the latest tools to strengthen the basic foundations of our lead generation efforts in three ways.

1. Make sure our pages addresses visitors concerns …with help from generative AI
2. Make sure we focus on the best sources of traffic …with help from GA4
3. Make sure our forms are easy to use …with help from a session recording tool

1. What deal-breakers did you miss on your key pages?

Use generative AI to find gaps in conversion copywriting.

Answering visitors’ questions is important.
Addressing visitors’ objections is critical.

A lot of your visitors may be ready to go. They’re mostly certain that your business is a good option, but there’s just one or two little things they want to check first. Those little deal breakers kill conversion rates.

Remember, there is a true story in the life of every visitor to every webpage. If the page copy aligns with that story, they are more likely to see your business as a good option. If the page copy misses a concern, they’ll find an option somewhere else.

Conversion pros know, you need to find out why they would NOT become a lead.

• What are people worried about when considering a new [product/service]?
• What do people hate about researching this [product/service]?
• What are the main motivations for looking for [product/service]?

How do you discover your visitors’ motivations and concerns?

The best way is through interviews with clients, or conversations with front-line sales and customer service reps. Or watch recordings of sales meetings.

The fastest way is to use AI. Create an AI-powered persona and then talk to it about its motivations and buying preferences.

Once you know their deal-breakers, you are ready to do some objection handling. We’ll use AI to check your key pages and find unaddressed concerns on your key pages. You can even have the AI summarize the findings in a little chart like this:

Here’s the process and the prompts for discovering the extent to which your most important pages address the most important concerns of your visitors.

First, upload your battle-tested ideal client profiles (ICPs) to your favorite AI tool, or use this persona prompt to generate a synthetic member of your target audience.

AI prompt: 

Build me a persona of a [job title] with [roles/skills/responsibility] at [industry/company size/geography]. This person is looking for help with [challenge/problem/task] and is considering [product/service]. List their hopes/dreams, fears/concerns, emotional triggers and decision criteria for hiring/contacting a [industry/category/service/product].

Next, get a full page screenshot of your homepage or any of your key service pages. You could just copy and paste in the text, but for conversion optimization, the visual rendering is better because some concerns may be addressed with imagery (trust seals like awards, data within charts, etc.). I use the GoFullPage Chrome extension for this.

Next, give the AI the persona and screenshot along with these prompts:

AI prompt: 

What does this persona worry about when considering a company in [industry] to do [service offering]? What would stop them from contacting a possible partner? To what extent does this webpage address those worries and concerns? List each concern and rate the extent to which the page addressed the concern on a scale of 0-5.

What does this persona really hate about searching for [our services]? To what extent does the page address that emotion? Rate on a scale of 0-5.

What are the main motivations for searching for a new provider for [service]? To what extent does the page align with those motivations? Rate on a scale of 0-5

And then finally, if you want to create that little heatmap matrix we showed above…

AI prompt:

Create a color-coded heatmap matrix summarizing the above ratings for each of the persona’s prioritized motivations and concerns.

See any gaps? Plug them with conversion copywriting and supportive evidence. If you’re not sure how best to address the concern, talk to sales. After all, the best B2B service pages emulate a sales conversation with your top sales rep.

Pro Tip: Write a sentence that fills in this blank: “People can work with us even if ____.” Anything written in that grammatical form is probably doing a good job with objection handling. 

2. What are your top landing page / traffic source combos?

Use the GA4 “Landing pages” report to find combinations of top converting pages and top converting traffic sources.

Your conversion copywriting is dialed in. Your messaging is on-point. Your supportive evidence is in place. Your next lead generation opportunity is to use data to spot opportunities.

• Some landing pages have better conversion rates than others
• Some traffic sources have better conversion rates than others
• Some landing page/traffic source combinations have MUCH better higher conversion rates than others!

Some marketers focus on UX, but don’t think a lot about the traffic source. Others focus on traffic, without looking closely at the UX. But every lead is a combination of a traffic source and landing page. Some combos have huge performance. Others generate nothing.

Find the combination of landing pages AND traffic sources and you’ll know what’s working from where. To find these, we’ll create a GA4 report with two dimensions: landing page and session source/medium. Here’s how.

1. Go to the Engagement > Landing Pages report in GA4
   Tip: If you’d like to rearrange the order of the columns in this report (which I’ve done for the screenshot below) click the pencil in the top right, then click on “Metrics” and re-order them. You can also add and remove metrics. (ex: Not ecommerce? Remove “Revenue”)
2. Click on the blue plus sign (+) at the top of the first column. Search for, then select “Session source/medium.” Now you’ll see a second column with that second dimension.
3. At the top of the “key event conversion rate” column (you may have to scroll to the right) use the dropdown to select your lead generation goal. In the screenshot below, you can see that ours is called “contact_lead.” Don’t see your lead gen goal? Contact your web agency and ask why they didn’t plug in the scoreboard.

Now you’re only looking at the conversion rate for actual leads. You’ve excluded other types of conversions such as subscribers, downloaders, event registrants and job applicants.

Scan down. You’ll notice that some combinations of landing pages and traffic sources have much higher conversion rates. In the example above, you can see the overall average is .88%, but some rows show 2x or 3x higher conversion rates.

Now you know exactly which website visits are the most profitable. You found the best combination of mousetrap and cheese. Now you just need more of that cheese.

• If google/organic + service page is a high performer, continue to search optimize that specific page. Make the content more detailed and use more of the semantically related phrases.
• If a directory + homepage is a high performer, look closely at your listing in that directory. Could you make it more compelling (add reviews)? Or make it more visible (become a sponsor)?
• If a social network + article is a high performer, get more active there. Post more often. Collaborate with influencers. Publish more on that topic and promote it on that network. Consider sponsoring posts.
• If a paid channel + landing page is a high performer, look closely at those ads. What creative is sending traffic to that page? Getting any ideas? Adjust your budgets and your other campaigns accordingly. And take a minute to find your lowest performing landing page / device category combinations and turn those ads off ASAP.

Surprised? It makes perfect sense. You can improve your website’s conversion rate just by improving traffic to high converting URLs. The conversion copywriter may miss this trick, but the analytics pro spots it everytime.

When the intent matches the offer, leads are born.

This idea is also at the heart of sales/marketing alignment. The team at Heinz Marketing help their clients by using account-matching technology (identify the high-potential accounts early) with personalized engagement plays (email, BDR outreach, remarketing, social targeting). There’s a technology cost, but Matt explains that the advantage is speed.

Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing “Many companies and CMOs don’t have the luxury of time to spend honing a strategy, or budget to launch a big campaign. Effective B2B marketing relies on strong foundations and a complex go-to-market strategy, typically requiring a significant upfront investment of time and resources to develop effective targeting, messaging, and offers before activating the campaigns that generate interest and eventually pipeline.”

Here’s another example of matching visitor intent and the offer on the page. In this case, it’s a mismatch. When the call to action on a page doesn’t align with the reason the visitor is on the page, conversion rates will be low. For example, a signup CTA on a service page or a lead gen CTA on a blog post.

Image source: How to design a button

3. Watch session recordings of ‘contact’ page visits

Use Clarity, Lucky Orange or HotJar to watch users fill out your forms.

First we used a tool to find our best opportunities.
Now let’s use another tool to find our biggest issues.

The most important click on your website is the submit button on the contact form. It’s the final step in the marketing funnel. The visitor has already decided they’re interested. Our goal now is really just to get out of their way and let them fill out the form.

But is there friction in this final marketing moment?

This conversion is tracked as a “key event” in GA4, but events are just numbers. They don’t tell the story. A path exploration shows the percentage of visitors who convert, but it doesn’t show your prospect fighting your forms.

The best way to spot issues is to watch session recordings of people using the form. Nothing can replace the shock and horror of actually watching your next prospect giving up and leaving.

1. Sign up for a tool such as Clarity (costs nothing)
2. Add the Javascript code to Google Tag Manager (takes minutes). Unlike GA4, there’s really nothing to set up.
3. Wait a week or two
4. Log in and filter the recordings to find the sessions where users touched the contact page.
5. Watch those session recordings.

If it’s an obvious problem (something is difficult or unnecessary) fix it right away. Do not AB test bug fixes.

If it’s a potential issue, remain calm and watch more recordings. These little videos are so compelling that it’s easy to jump to big conclusions after watching one or two. Don’t get triggered. Keep watching. Test the forms yourself. Ask someone else to use it and watch over their shoulder.

Pro Tip: While you’re in the session recording tool, watch the sessions with rage clicks (visitors quickly tapping again and again in the same small area) and dead clicks (visitors clicked something but nothing happened). These are often interesting.

At the top of this post, we added a video that shows a session recording of our own site. Watch and you’ll see a visitor who missed a required field that should have been optional (“How did you hear about us?”). The visitor attempted to submit the form, saw the form validation error …and then left the website.

Ten minutes after watching that video, we changed the form, so that field is no longer required. Here are your contact form best practices:

• Fewer fields are better
  …although one extra field doesn’t usually affect conversion rates
• Require only the fields that you truly need to respond to the lead
  That’s pretty much just means the contact information
• For mobile, use the appropriate keyboard
  Does the ZIP code field bring up the numeric keyboard? Does the email field show the keyboard with the @ sign? These micro-opportunities may not improve conversion rates, but they are common courtesy.

Other good ideas to try:

• Use a header above the form telling them what they are doing and why
  “Schedule time for a quick consultation”
• Commit (with a bit of text) to responding to lead within a certain amount of time.
  “We will be in touch within 24 hours”

Even better than responding quickly, you can allow them to schedule a time with a rep right from the form.

Alina Vandenberg, Co-founder, Chili Piper “The gap from form submission to meeting is actually a leakage point. A lot of qualified form fills never make it to a meeting. If the lead is qualified, book them on the spot with a scheduling widget. This can yield an 80% lift in qualified leads getting to sales meetings. That’s a huge difference.”

Be found. Be informative. Be Easy.

We used some more advanced techniques. We got help from some more advanced tools. But those basic principles never change.

Visitors are smart. They know how to find the best option for their business. Our job is simply to make sure that they can easily find us, to make sure they get all the info they need to know to consider us as an option, and finally to make it easy to reach out if and when they’re ready.