Use Call Tracking to Optimize Marketing Efforts

TRACKING ONLINE AND OFFLINE ADVERTISING MEDIUMS

When people talk about phone call tracking and analytics, they think it’s a limited niche with limited options. In reality, however, the limitations are mostly due to lack of an innovative approach to merging call tracking with the rest of a brand’s marketing and sales campaign. You can actually use call analytics to track the performance of advertising channels. Better yet: call tracking actually tracks both offline and online channels.

Here’s a quick example: how do you track an advertising campaign that uses newspaper ads and pay per click (PPC) ads? Simply place separate phone numbers in both channels to track calls. Combine the data from inquiries, qualified leads, and conversions from the phone calls to the other data collected from both channels like newspaper reach and PPC ad frequency and click-through rates and you have a comprehensive overview of offline and online performance under one campaign.

MONITORING KEYWORD PERFORMANCE IN PPC

Since we already touched upon PPC, let’s look at another innovative way call tracking can contribute to marketing optimization: keyword performance tracking.

Keyword performance is often a metric relegated to Google analytics and the digital realm, but any conversion optimization expert will tell you that keywords play a vital role in the persuasion of target audiences. Keywords are much more nuanced than people often think, especially in paid advertising.

Keyword performance affects at least three main factors that all contribute to the efficacy of a PPC ad:

• Keyword targeting that matches queries technically and contextually
• Keyword relevance to the current stage of the buying cycle target audiences find themselves in — this is where the stages of search (navigational, informational, and transactional) come in
• Persuasion — how much the keyword contributes to the decision-making of target audiences to click through or make a phone call

Tracking calls from PPC ads show you what ad groups and what certain keywords within those ad groups work really well across all three dimensions, especially Persuasion.

IDENTIFYING HIGH-PERFORMANCE CONVERSION PAGES

We mentioned conversion optimization — a crucial and advanced facet of marketing. Call tracking and analytics can also provide invaluable data on high performing conversion pages.

The obvious way of doing this is by assigning specific numbers to specific conversion pages and track how well they performed based on the calls coming in. Take it a step further, and you can match the numbers of organic and paid traffic coming into a conversion page and split the conversion rate between methods of contact depending on what you indicated per page (email, submission form, phone number, etc). Get a bit more advanced and you can tell your sales team to always ask how leads found your conversion pages, and then cross-reference Google analytics data to check conversion paths and see what your conversion funnel looks like in action.

Analyzing the conversion path via analytics and directly asking your leads can show you high impact pages that led to a conversion page outperforming others. Every consumer journey towards any conversion page is multi-touch, and often purchase decisions are influenced not only by the conversion page but the touch points that came before it.

CONVERSELY, FINDING LOW PERFORMING PAGES

In the same way call, tracking can identify high-performance conversion pages, it can also provide data on low performing conversion pages.

By virtue of the lack of calls coming in from specific numbers assigned to specific conversion pages compared to others, you can already tell some aren’t as effective as the rest. You should perform a nuanced analysis of this, however, and check a few things, like:

• Frequency of other communication methods indicated in poorly performing conversion page — perhaps this conversion page displays a service or product that target audiences simply have no reason to call in for so they use email and submission forms instead.
• Marketing copy — is the marketing copy in these conversion pages low quality or do they subtly hint against calling?
• Conversion path — again, as explained above, the touch points before the conversion page affect the purchase decision, and you might notice that poorly performing pages don’t have that many touch points pointing towards it, hinting that the conversion page itself may not be to blame for poor performance.

TRAINING MARKETING AND SALES EMPLOYEES

Finally, call tracking and analytics comes with call recording. You can listen in on previous calls to train your marketing and sales staff by showing them what works, what doesn’t, and what can be changed for the better.

In fact, training your people in in-person, over-the-phone sales is crucial, because this is the make or break moment.

Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our studio specializes in logo and website design, as well as photography and marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.

Fivenson Studios: Michigan’s #1 Graphic Design, Web Design, & Digital Advertising Agency

Let’s Get Social | https://fivensonstudios.com | (734) 224-9696 | [email protected]