Visibility

Marketers are faced with four challenges today: increase lead flow, demonstrate ROI, optimize ad spend and improve lead quality. These challenges are particularly evident when looking at PPC and SEO programs, as marketers struggle to understand exactly what keywords are prompting phone calls. It’s a constant battle to showcase ROI and drive and convert leads.

So why is it typically difficult for online marketers to demonstrate true ROI for these programs? A simple reason: they often fail to track phone calls. It’s a reality that consumers frequently pick up the phone and call a company instead of filling out a web form. In fact, sixty-five percent of businesses consider phone calls their highest quality lead source, according to BIA/Kelsey & ConStat Commerce Monitor.

Measuring phone calls from online marketing campaigns is a necessary step to get full credit for your marketing results. For instance, AdInsight research reports that 43% of all Internet search sales conversions are happening over the phone today; strong evidence that call tracking is a needed component to determine what’s working – and what isn’t – with online marketing. If you’re not tracking offline behavior, you’re losing key insight into how consumers are reaching you, and consequently how you can encourage those interactions.

Thought leaders like Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0, have expressed the importance of call tracking on their blogs. “If you have a phone number on your site then you would be very well-advised to implement a phone call tracking solution of your website,” he writes. Lance Loveday, author of Web Design for ROI and CEO of Closed Loop Marketing, agrees.

“Advertisers with multiple sales channels will finally be able to judge the true performance of their campaigns at a very detailed level, which will ultimately allow them to spend their limited advertising dollars more intelligently,” writes Loveday.

As a marketer, you need to have a full understanding of the results your efforts generate. If you can prove that your SEM campaigns are doing more than just generating clicks — and even better, actually generating conversions both online and offline — then you can demonstrate the full value marketing provides your organization.

Here are ways that call tracking can be used to address the four marketing challenges.

Using Call Tracking to Increase Lead Flow

As an online marketer, you’re constantly pressured to increase lead flow. With call tracking, marketers can perform A/B tests of landing pages with a “call us” call-to-action. By placing a unique call tracking number on each page variation of a website, you’re able to measure differences in the percent of phone calls for each page. You can then determine which pages and call-to-action initiatives are driving the most leads, not just the most online leads.

Using Call Tracking to Demonstrate ROI

From Q4 2009 to Q1 2010, WebVisible says there was a 35 percent increase in the percentage of search clicks that resulted in a phone call for advertisers using call tracking numbers. Without call tracking, it would be difficult to assess the online advertising success of individual campaigns.

By using call tracking numbers wherever you have a phone call-to-action, you can track exactly what online sources are driving phone leads.

An example of this is seen with Blue Tent Marketing, an Internet marketing agency that recognized their clients had a significant blind spot around what Internet marketing initiatives were really working. Blue Tent consequently turned to call tracking to help them find out.

Blue Tent client, TellurideLodging.com, assigned unique toll-free phone numbers to each online marketing initiative: email, PPC, banner ads and event sponsorships. They were able to view the volume of calls generated by each 800-number, and consequently what campaigns were generating the most calls (and most sales). During the span of one month, Google Analytics showed that a total of 7,300 online visits to TellurideLodging.com resulted in around 31 online transactions, for a conversion rate of .4%.

In looking at call tracking statistics for the same time period, 1,035 phone calls were generated (of which 686 were unique caller IDs) across 19 unique 800-numbers. Thirty-three percent of those unique callers were “leads” and the conversion rate for those calls was also around 33%, or 75 closed calls. Tracking phone calls enabled Telluride Lodging and Blue Tent to report a significant 340% increase in ROI than if they had not been tracking calls.

According to Blue Tent, without call tracking those transactions would have most likely been tagged as direct bookings. Instead, thanks to call tracking, they were correctly recorded as leads generated after someone came across an online marketing campaign and called in to the unique 800-number. 

Using Call Tracking to Optimize Ad Spend

For companies looking to optimize ad spend, you can take call tracking one step further: to keyword-level call tracking. This is critical because often times the most eager buyers call you, and they use different keyword searches than customers that buy online. Understanding which keywords drive phone calls will help you optimize your bidding strategy.
Here’s how it works: Depending on the traffic referral source, a web visitor will be shown unique a phone number unique and the traffic source will be logged. Showing unique call tracking numbers on your website based on traffic source is as simple as copying and pasting two lines of code.

When a user dials the number they see on a website, a pop-up menu appears on the salesperson’s computer screen detailing specifics about the lead, such as the keyword searched, the location of the caller, and the caller’s information if he or she is already a customer.  After the call, the salesperson can note if the lead turned into a sale, and the revenue associated with that sale. The marketing team can then analyze reports at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level about visits, calls, call duration, and conversion rate, and also listen to a recording of each sales conversation.

If certain PPC campaigns and keywords are not working, you can optimize ad spend by reallocating money and investing in those that are driving the most leads. You may also find that keywords that don’t drive online conversions actually drive many phone call leads.

A keyword-level call tracking report shows details about calls for specific domain names, ad groups, and keywords.

As a case in point, Marquis Dental Spa, a full service dental spa offering general dentistry, cosmetic dentistry, Invisalign and orthodontics, needed to identify what advertising and marketing campaigns were offering them a return on investment. They wanted to specifically track where leads and appointments were being generated, ultimately determining how to more effectively allocate specific channel investments.

After deploying a call tracking solution, Marquis Dental Spa was able to cut their cost per new patient in half. They also found the majority of their leads were originating from Facebook, a key piece of insight they used to strategically invest more money in this channel.

So how did they do this? Marquis Dental Spa used call tracking to assign more than 250 unique local numbers to their advertisements that spanned across various online channels, such as paid search and social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Assigning unique local phone numbers to each campaign, they could pinpoint the source of a phone lead. This, in turn, enabled them to establish a solid ROI figure for each channel.

Using Call Tracking to Improve Lead Quality

According to speak2leads.com, companies spend a significant portion of their budget to generate Internet leads, using lead management and CRM systems to track them. What’s often overlooked, they cite, is how slowly companies respond to these leads. A Kellogg study on Lead Response Management (LRM) revealed the odds of connecting with a lead increases by 100 times if attempted within five minutes versus 30 minutes. And the odds of converting a lead if called in five minutes versus 30 minutes increases by 21 times. By using call tracking, you’ll understand why a prospect is calling, enabling you to greet and distribute the lead in an efficient and personalized manner, further improving lead quality and your chances of turning the prospect into a customer.

Using call tracking as a solution to common online marketing challenges, marketers can measure the true ROI of campaigns and more efficiently allocate their company’s SEO and PPC budgets, putting more money into keywords that ultimately drive revenue. Businesses can get a better understanding of the overall attribution model – enabling marketers to truly understand where leads originate and respond accordingly.