Tracking web conversions from your Google, Bing, and other paid search ads is critical, of course. Every marketer knows that. But if that’s all the measuring you do, you aren’t doing your campaigns justice.
What’s more, you might be making some incorrect assumptions about ad performance that are costing you conversions and sales.
Ask yourself this: what if instead of filling out your web form, a visitor from one of your Google ads picks up the phone and calls you?
Can you tell exactly which landing page and ad drove that call? Can you tell if the call even came from Google paid search?
Failing to track the inbound phone calls (and the subsequent sales opportunities and revenue) your paid search campaigns generate can be problematic. First, you might be generating a ton of phone calls and revenue that you aren’t getting credit for.
Failing to track these calls as conversions could be doing your marketing a grave disservice. Plus, without call conversion and revenue data it’s possible that you are killing ads, campaigns, landing pages, and keywords that are driving high-quality sales calls – or conversely, continuing to pour money into ones that aren’t.
Second, inbound phone calls from paid search campaigns are often from people who are more ready to engage with a sales manager (and therefore more likely to become revenue) than web form conversions.
A 2013 study by eMarketer found that a larger percentage of sales managers rate telephone calls as “excellent” or “good” – more than any other lead type. It’s why phone calls are the very conversion marketers most need to track to accurately measure ROI from paid search.
In order to track phone calls as conversions, marketers can use call tracking software. Call tracking is a form of lead attribution and marketing analytics software that enables you to attribute inbound calls to the exact marketing source that originated it. It works for any marketing source, and for paid search it can tell you the specific PPC keyword, ad, and landing page that drove a particular call to your business.
Below are 5 ways marketers can leverage a call tracking tool and the phone to optimize paid search marketing for conversions.
Marketers can use call data to track which ads are best at driving phone calls. Whether it’s tracking conversions from mobile click-to-call links or tracking phone calls from call extensions in your ads, call data helps marketers understand which specific ads are best at driving phone calls.
You can even run an A/B test using an ad with a call extension (and tracking phone number) and an ad without to see which drives the most conversions that turn into opportunities.
Most marketers know that having a successful paid search strategy is critical. With so much at stake, marketers must be able to accurately track the phone calls their paid search efforts generate to optimize ads, landing pages, and keywords and test new networks.
The critical component to tracking phone calls from paid search is using call data in ROI reporting. Without call data, paid search reports will be inaccurate and this can lead to mismanaged campaign optimization.
You can learn more about the importance of tracking calls from PPC in this eBook, “Marketer’s Guide to Call Tracking for Google SEO and PPC”.
About the Author: Jane Intrieri is a Search Marketing Specialist at Ifbyphone. She is responsible for the execution of Ifbyphone’s overall internet marketing strategy, including lead generation efforts, the effectiveness of Ifbyphone SEM efforts, while also managing and maintaining day-to-day website and marketing automation related operations.