Back in May 2009, I wrote a post about the 4 Ways to Measure Your Conversions in PPC, and touched on Phone Call Tracking as an incredibly important way to track offline activity from your PPC (and other online) campaigns.
We’ve had more than a few discussions here in the Toronto office at TechWyse over the past few weeks about improving the conversion performance on a number of clients’ internet marketing campaigns. For a majority of them, we were not seeing conversion numbers (via email submissions) that we would like. Then it hit us…
What is it about these particular clients that keep visitors from filling out a form on a website?
Some website visitors want personal contact.
Some People Need Direct Contact
It’s so simple you might not have thought about it. People want and need to talk to another human being to help influence the decision making process. Not every company is suited to this form of conversion tracking, but a great many of them are.
Think about it. When you need to find a new dentist, doctor, or lawyer, would you rather talk to the professional themselves, or fill out a form and wait around hoping that someone a) received your mail, and b) will actually call or email you back?I know I’d want to speak to someone who could schedule me an appointment on the spot, address a concern, or agree to meet me for a consultation.
Personal contact also builds trust and establishes a legitimacy to your business, potentially increasing sales, leads, or meetings.
How Phone Call Tracking Works
This is where phone call tracking has become so important for firms that effectively measure internet marketing campaigns.
Companies like ours are then able to setup unique toll free phone numbers and forward them to your regular phone number. So you don’t see any difference on your end. Then we will setup a small script on your site. Based upon where each visitor came from the phone number will change. So we can then associate a unique toll free number to any visitor source. Some examples would be Google Pay Per Click, Google Organic, Direct, Facebook and so on.
By giving your internet marketing company this type of power, we can now begin telling you not only how many lead forms your received but also how many phone calls.
The result? A completely accurate cost per lead!
What’s best? The cost for the service is generally far less than a normal phone line would cost for up to 3 phone numbers!
So What Are You Waiting For?
If you’re not tracking phone calls, you don’t have a complete view on establishing a return on investment for your online ad campaigns. What if your client brings you a web site or web page that does not have a contact form, but does have a phone number? As long as there is an end goal or purpose to the page, you should be tracking the contacts aimed at meeting this goal, no matter what the source.
We all know – every business online has an end goal to their site – attracting new customers.
Written By Matt
A PPC extraordinaire, Mr Hogan can be found deep in the anals of PPC admins everywhere. Researching, administering and writing. Sometimes he even finds the time to contact the outside world with a blog or two.
Topical info on phone tracking. Phone tracking is advisable as it can track sale conversions and sales values to get true ROI reporting. My first three campaigns went not-tracked and that time my total CTR conversion was 2.8% but after adding the tracking software it records a figure closer to two digit!
Matt, by this method can we track phone calls at the keyword level?
It’s great to know that phone calls can also be tracked with a snippet of a script. Customer can get accurate results without delay if phone numbers are given especially in the food/beverages and health care industry websites. But as spam mails are recieved from contact forms, is there a chance of getting wrong calls with the phone numbers given in the websites and thereby contribute to wrong tracking report? Just curious.
Curtis;
The current software we use does not have a keyword-tracking ability, so for now we can not track them directly.
However, if the client absolutely wanted it with this current program, we could manually tag our landing URLs and create goals in Analytics based on the tagged keywords. A little extra work, but the ability to track is not impossible.
Anyone else aware of call-tracking software with a keyword-specific goal tracking ability?
Jay;
The phone numbers are dynamically inserted, so unless you click on a certain ad, or enter the site from a certain path (like from an organic Google search result), it’s near impossible to have mistaken calls.
Of course, manually dialing a wrong number can cause a problem but it’s very rare.
Can you recommend a good call tracking (number split testing) software package available for resale? I want to offer my clients a stand alone unique phone number data tracking solution so they can see which (on and offline) ads are – or are not – working.
Seamus;
Unfortunately, we’re not familiar with any Australian-based solutions for this.
The service we use is limited to North American phone numbers at the present time. I’d love to know if you’ve come across any solutions in the Oceania region.
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