As a marketer, it's easy to take the approach of, "The lead is generated, so now my job is done." As I stated at the beginning, generating the lead is the easy part. Taking the mindset of "my job is done, now it's 100 percent up to sales" is a great way to fuel a tenacious relationship between your sales and marketing teams. As a marketer, generating all the leads in the world doesn't matter unless the leads turn into sales. This is where analytics plays a key role.

As a "numbers guy," this step in the process is one of my favorites. When describing to our sales team what my team measures, I tell them that we measure every single step in the process, from the time someone sees our ad until after someone buys a policy from us, and every little detail in between. Looking at the end outcome down to the campaign level, as well as all of the steps in between, will quickly tell you which campaigns are working and which are failing. In addition, if you break each campaign down by each individual salesperson, you're likely to find wide ranges of performance.

So what's the next step once you've done the measurement? Take a hard look at your worst performing campaigns and figure out if there is any way to improve them. If you're able to improve the campaign through marketing efforts like creative optimization, landing page optimization or marketing communications, then do so. This is what you can control. If you find that nothing you do from an optimization standpoint makes the campaign successful, then kill the campaign.

On the other hand, when you find campaigns that are working well, focus your efforts on those campaigns. This is where you'll be best served funneling the lion's share of your advertising budget. Also, just like you would do with failing campaigns, continue to optimize the campaigns where you're already showing success. You'll be surprised by how much you can squeeze out of the good campaigns with a little more marketing optimization.