For service based businesses, Pay Per Click Advertising is one of the most cost effective forms of marketing. However, it is very difficult to track certain functions. Most businesses are forced to focus on web forms with CRM integration to track their leads and follow up with potential customers. When leads come in from paid search, they can track them from an analytics platform and goal setup. An additional tool that is often not utilised is call tracking.
Call tracking is not a new concept which helps to differentiate your search campaigns from other website traffic. Typically, this works by placing a snippet of code onto the website that can alter the phone number when someone enters the site through a paid advertisement. The new phone number is forwarded to an existing phone of the business’s choosing (no additional lines to manage).
When someone calls in through the call tracking number, there is a lot of data that can be provided for analysis. Some of these features would include phone number of caller, call duration, if phone was answered, time of call, and location of caller (if available). This data can then be used to analyse the effectiveness of paid search efforts and the quality of the phone calls that come in through different marketing campaigns.
Additionally, a company could have multiple call tracking numbers based on the different search engine campaigns they run. For instances; separate tracking numbers for Google and Bing. This would allow to see which engine delivers more calls and which drives more quality traffic to the website. In addition, call tracking can help you better understand aspects of campaign performance that web analytics alone cannot. Given below are few pointers.
- Preferred method of communication — Depending on the industry, audience and product or service, leads may be more inclined to call than fill out a form. Understanding your audience’s preferred communication method is key to adjusting calls to action on PPC landing pages, and other marketing initiatives, to improve conversion rates.
- Landing pages — If your landing page is designed to generate web form submissions, but instead drives more calls, it may be an indication that the page content is confusing, the main call to action is not obvious or the web form is too involved. Making adjustments and tracking the number and type of conversions over time can help maximise performance.
- Call recording — Most call tracking solutions offer the option to record phone conversations. From a PPC campaign perspective, these recordings can be used to better understand the type of questions leads are consistently asking, so you can adjust the content on your landing pages accordingly. Lead volume generated by your PPC campaign is often the most important metric for evaluating success. By simply tracking online conversions through web analytics, you may be missing a significant portion of lead data.
- Tracking online conversions is easy with PPC and web analytics programmes, such as Google Analytics. This tool associates online conversions directly with a campaign, ad group, ad and keyword. Unfortunately, as soon as someone picks up a phone, this useful lead intelligence is lost.
- To effectively gauge PPC campaign success you need to see all pieces of the lead-conversion puzzle, whether activity occurs online or off. Without a complete understanding of conversion rates and cost per conversion no matter where they take place, making edits to a campaign may do more harm than good.
- To track offline conversions, you may want to consider a call tracking solution. Call tracking captures lead information for all phone calls received from PPC and associates them with the appropriate campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords.
- Call tracking involves more than simply recording the number of calls received. It’s part of a sophisticated marketing methodology that gives users accurate, real-time campaign effectiveness figures.
- Call tracking allocates a distinct phone number, local or toll-free, for each unique source you want to track. Reports can be as general as calls from all search engines or as specific as calls from one unique paid search term.
- When a visitor arrives on your site, the software conducts a search to determine which phone number is associated with the visitor’s origin. That phone number is then dynamically added throughout the site and cookied within their browser, so even if they return at a later time, they will continue to see the same number until the cookie is deleted.
- As soon as a visitor makes a call to this tracking number, the program logs call time, PPC campaign information, available ID information, geographic location and the last web page visited, among other things.
- A complete lead picture shows how each campaign, ad group, ad and keyword is performing, helping advertisers more effectively identify best- and worst-performing elements to efficiently shift budgets and update or delete under- performers.
LogicSpeak:
For effective improvement of your campaign performance and maximising your ROI, you need to track both online and offline conversions. This requires the integration of both web analytic and call tracking. Call tracking for local Pay Per Click ads enable you to understand your consumer base better along with the overall effectiveness of your campaign.
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