Start Me Up! A profile of Convertable

Convertable is a web app which aims to improve the quality of information captured on contact forms for lead generation.

It grabs additional data, including keyword, geo-location, pages viewed, and visitor history for each individual contact.

I’ve been asking Chris Hull and Patrick Smith how the app works, and the company’s plans for the future…

By Graham Charlton January 17th 2013 19:02

In one sentence, what is Convertable? 

Convertable is a web-based analytics tool that captures powerful real-time insights about each individual user who submits a contact form on websites (as opposed to Google Analytics which provides aggregated stats).

What problem(s) does Convertable solve?

Most contact forms only shoot off an email containing the information that a user fills out whereas typical conversion tracking tools only provide aggregated data with no easy way to attribute analytics data to any individual lead.

Convertable bridges this gap by combining lead submissions with web analytics that provide invaluable information about the user’s visit (traffic source, keyword, advertising campaign, hostname, location, previous visits, pages viewed, time spent on site, and more).  

Convertable also goes the next step and captures all of this tracking data from the first time a prospect ever arrived on a site through every follow-up visit until a form is submitted. This data allows users to uncover the original source of each individual lead in order to accurately credit it to the appropriate marketing channel; most conversion tracking tools give full credit to the source of the final visit).

This allows users to see which campaigns are working, which deserve partial credit and which are not performing well at all.  When and why did you launch it? Convertable was hatched after we began asking our search-marketing clients about the quality of leads coming through their contact forms.

We wanted to measure the actual ROI of their campaigns by identifying the original source of every lead that resulted in an actual closed sale (which oftentimes took three months after the original inquiry was submitted) and found there was no way to do this with current analytics tools.  

Because traditional conversion tracking and web analytics tools (like Google Analytics) only offer aggregated, anonymous metrics, tracking hits a dead end once the form is submitted.

Further, since most forms do not pass along web analytics data with the emails or to a CRM, it is impossible to tie the original source to each individual lead all the way through the end of the sales process to then determine how much revenue was generated by each lead or marketing campaign.  

Seeing a need to bridge this critical gap between web analytics and closed sales, we created Convertable.   Who is your target audience? Generally, any company with a contact form can benefit from Convertable.

Specifically, any small-to-midsize company whose websites is a significant lead generator and that wants a better way to track and analyze those leads without using a full-blown CRM or marketing-automation platform.

A power user would be a savvy online marketer or search-marketing consultant who wants to capture smart data on web leads through the end of the sales funnel can use Convertable to determine where to allocate marketing dollars toward the channels with the best leads.

What are your immediate goals? 

The immediate goals are to:

Continue to educate search and web marketing professionals on how their contact forms could be much more powerful tools.
Add as many users as possible and gather feedback on their needs.
Add more features to Convertable that users find useful.

What were the biggest challenges involved in building Convertable?

 Since the concept of conversion tracking is still relatively new and essentially largely unknown to anyone outside the online marketing industry, the biggest challenge has been educating people about why lead-analytics data is important and how Convertable offers much more than typical conversion tracking tools.

How will the company make money? 

Convertable will remain free for our beta users, but eventually we will offer a tiered pricing model with premium features.

Who is in your team?

Patrick Smith. Prior to co-founding Convertable, Patrick co-founded Streamline Metrics, a Richmond-based search marketing firm, in 2008. He got his start in online marketing by creating his own online news portal which grew to an average audience of over 50,000 unique visitors a day.
Patrick understands that inbound marketing is a constantly evolving industry and he remains on the cutting edge through creative experimentation, sound fundamentals and industry research.

Patrick is a huge advocate of conversion tracking, a trend moving beyond mere SEO and PPC, to clearly determine the greatest ROI of marketing campaigns.
Chris Hull - In addition to co-founding Convertable, Chris also founded and runs HeliumStudio (a boutique web development firm) and co-founded Streamline Metrics (an SEO firm). His former life includes work at several large-scale web development companies.
Chris brings user experience and design skills to Convertable. He has a passion for helping businesses grow and believes that design work is integral to success.

Where would you like to be in one, three and five years’ time?

By this time next year, we would like to have the monetization in place and have Convertable fully self-sustaining as a standalone business. In three years’ time, our goal is to have a team of dedicated developers to continue adding more functionality.

In five years’ time, we would like to be known as an industry leader in Marketing Analytics