In recent years, WhatsApp has emerged as a powerful marketing tool that offers businesses new opportunities to engage with potential customers and boost lead generation. 

Just like any other marketing channel important to understand how leads interact with your WhatsApp channel and how it performs in terms of conversions and user behavior. 

Easier said than done. 

While WhatsApp allows you to monitor conversations, it doesn’t have a built-in conversion tracking system, which means you’ll need to come up with a few workarounds, especially when it comes to WhatsApp opt-in source attribution. 

In this article, we’ll dive into the challenges of tracking WhatsApp lead generation campaigns and offer you the tried and tested solutions we’ve come up with. 

The Importance of Tracking in WhatsApp Lead Generation

As with any other marketing strategy you use to generate leads, it’s important to understand and track how users interact with your WhatsApp campaigns to be able to measure their effectiveness. 

In the context of WhatsApp lead generation, conversions refer to specific actions you want a lead to take after engaging with your WhatsApp channel. These can include submitting their contact details, signing up for a newsletter, booking a demo, and more. Along the way, they may also be prompted to respond to questions or CTAs, and click on shared links or images, among others. These are some of the behaviors leads may show during their journey from prospective to paying customers.

Tracking conversions and user behavior helps you measure the success of your WhatsApp lead generation campaigns and understand their return on investment (ROI.)

This is important for a few reasons:

• Understanding how many leads your WhatsApp strategy is generating and how many of those convert. Without proper tracking in place, you’re left guessing what’s working and what’s not. 
• In turn, this helps you optimize your WhatsApp strategy and tweak what’s needed to improve its effectiveness. 
• Conversion tracking also lets you segment leads based on their engagement with your WhatsApp channel, which can help you personalize follow-up messages that address their specific needs.
• Tracking user behavior can help you identify lead drop-off points and understand what types of messages, content, or CTA are negatively affecting lead engagement. 
• Finally, by analyzing user behavior on WhatsApp, you can enhance the user experience and tailor future interactions to leads’ preferences to keep them interested and moving down the sales funnel. 

Challenges in Tracking WhatsApp Campaigns

By now, I probably haven’t told you anything new about the importance of tracking your WhatsApp lead generation campaigns. As marketers, we might not always love this part of the process, but we understand why it’s needed. 

When it comes to WhatsApp communication, we need to distinguish between business-initated — when the business starts the conversation, say, by sending a WhatsApp newsletter — and user-initated conversations — when a user clicks on a WhatsApp chatbot link or scans a QR code and initiates a conversation by sending the first message. 

The first ones aren’t a problem, as for each sent campaign you can track the metrics and understand how they’re performing. 

The challenge is to properly track user-initiated conversations and figure out their source attribution. 

When using WhatsApp for lead generation, there are a lot of entry points to your WhatsApp channel — a link to your chatbot in an ad, a landing page, or a LinkedIn paid campaign, just to name a few. And here, you might be thinking, “Why don’t I just use UTM parameters to track where the leads came from?” The thing is, unlike other links, WhatsApp links do not support UTM parameters. 

So, if you want to track if your WhatsApp leads originate from a Facebook or LinkedIn campaign, from a landing page, or from another source, how can you do it?

Tracking Conversions and User Behavior with Landbot

If you’re unfamiliar with it, at Landbot we have our own Ungated Conversations WhatsApp channel where you can get the latest news on our features, case studies, and other resources to boost your lead management strategy. 

This means that we were faced with the tracking challenges mentioned above. So, of course, we had to find workarounds using our product.

Here are the top three solutions we found that allow us to track conversions and behavior on user-initiated WhatsApp conversations. 

Personalized First Message with Trackable Keywords

As you’re probably aware, WhatsApp requires users to actively opt-in to receive business communications. This opt-in happens in two steps:

• First, leads give businesses their phone numbers via a click-to-WhatsApp link, QR code, or other entry point;
• And second, they give confirmation that businesses can contact them by sending a first message, replying to one, or clicking a button. 

This preview message is one way to track the initial source of the conversation by including trackable keywords. Here’s how it works:

First, you have to store the personalized message in the user_input variable at the beginning of your chatbot flow. If you’re new to Landbot, think of a variable as a kind of “box” you can name and store information (values) inside. So, if you want to save specific values from a lead’s answer to your bot (for example, their phone number or company name), you can save them under a variable. 

Then, you have to choose a word (or words) from the personalized message that identifies the opt-in’s source (e.g. LinkedIn) and define it with a condition (e.g. If the user input contains “LinkedIn”.)

Next, you must create a new variable called optin_source (or any other name you want that helps you easily identify the variable) and add the name of the source as the value (e.g., linkedin_header).

Finally, repeat the same process for each of your WhatsApp channel’s opt-in sources, and make sure to assign a different keyword to each source and don’t repeat any keywords. This way, all your sources will be stored to let you know where your WhatsApp leads come from and detect your main lead source(s).  

As an example, here’s an overview of all the identified opt-in sources for our WhatsApp channel:

And this is how they are stored inside the variable:

As you can see, even without a UTM parameter in the chatbot link, there’s a different solution to tracking the source attribution of your WhatsApp lead generation channel. 

UTM Parameters in Web Chatbots that Redirect to WhatsApp

Now, before this gets confusing, I know I mentioned UTM parameters don’t work for WhatsApp chatbot links. But they do work for website chatbots that redirect leads to WhatsApp and, this way, carry the source information over to WhatsApp. 

In this case, you would store the UTM parameters in the web bot URL as a variable and then save them as an opt-in source. 

For this source tracking solution, you would get opt-in consent to WhatsApp directly from a web chatbot. For that, youll need to use the Opt-in Brick Workaround to validate the leads’ phone numbers and opt them in to your WhatsApp channel. 

This approach is a bit more technical, but it is effective in tracking leads who come through web bots into WhatsApp.

Tracking User Behavior with the Goal Block

Moving on to tracking user behavior, the Landbot builder allows you to check your bot’s flow analytics and track the conversion and drop-off ratio from each of your chatbot’s blocks. This allows you to see the percentage of leads who, after reaching a certain block, followed which of the possible paths, and the ones who drop-off at which specific point. 

This already gives you some insight on user behavior towards your WhatsApp chatbot, but you might want to track even more detailed actions. For that, you can use the Goal block. 

The Goal block allows you to track any lead behavior during their interaction with your WhatsApp bot, including if they have provided their email address, answered a set of qualifying questions, interacted with a quiz, and anything else you can think of. And yes, you can track multiple goals inside the same chatbot flow. 

The Goal block is a great way to track user behavior, since it gives you better insight into the progress throughout a conversation and allows you to identify areas of improvement. Let’s say you’re using a WhatsApp quiz as part of your lead generation strategy. You can track “quiz started” as one goal and “quiz completed” as another goal. If you notice that a lot of leads are starting the quiz, but not finishing it, it might mean, for example, that the quiz has too many questions which makes leads drop-off halfway. 

If you have defined goals for your WhatsApp chatbot, you’ll be able to look at their performance in the “Metrics” section of your bot. There, you can select each of the goals you’ve set and their respective rate:

While the Goal block isn’t exclusive to WhatsApp chatbots, it is a valuable tool to use in your WhatsApp lead generation strategy. 

Conclusion

Tracking conversions and user behavior on WhatsApp is a no-brainer for measuring the success of your lead generation efforts and optimizing future WhatsApp campaigns. 

By implementing one, some, or all of the above solutions, you’re on the right track to monitor your WhatsApp channel’s performance, gain deeper insights into lead behavior, make the necessary changes and, ultimately, boost the ROI of your WhatsApp lead generation strategy.