You know how valuable phone calls are to your business. You know that a ringing phone is better than a click on an online form any day. The problem is, you don’t know what is making some people call, and why others aren’t calling. Even if you have some level of call tracking, the odds are that you’re left with a lot of questions.
Questions like:
How do I know which Google searches lead people to call? What is the return on investment (ROI) for my pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns? Which keywords are worth bidding on? Where should I focus my organic search engine optimization (SEO) efforts?
All these questions and more can be answered with keyword-level call tracking.
ROI Data Helps You Link Dollars and Sense in Your Campaigns
Organic and paid search together likely account for 60-70% of your site traffic. That’s why you’re putting money into PPC and SEO. The problem is, you don’t know which PPC and SEO efforts are actually paying off in terms of phone calls.
For online forms, that data is obvious. You can track the traffic entering your site for certain keyword searches and follow it to the completion of the form. But for calls, it’s different. You’re left with a lot of traffic and a few calls, and you’re trying to match the two and make decisions about your advertising dollars on the basis of guesses.
Call tracking at the keyword level can change that. With call tracking at the keyword level, you can tell just which searches lead to calls, and which searches are people lead to people idly browsing your site. This way you know which keywords are really worth bidding on when they get expensive.
The keyword data will also give you intelligence on your inbound prospects. It will help your salespeople understand the primary concerns that drive potential customers to call, giving them the ability to close more leads.
CallRail’s Keyword Tracking Technique
How is CallRail able to precisely track which keywords turn into calls? That’s easy. Whenever someone comes to your site from search, whether they click on a PPC or organic search result, they will be shown a specific phone number when they reach your site. Wherever they go on your site, they see that specific phone number. When they call that number, that call is linked with the keyword they used to get that number.
You might think this means you need a phone number for each keyword, but you don’t. Our software can link the keyword search to a number that is drawn from a pool of numbers you have maintained. You need to have enough numbers that each user reaching your site through search traffic at the same time can be assigned a unique number. That’s just one number for each potential lead that is on your site at the same time.
What’s Wrong with Other Tracking Techniques
The keyword-level call tracking technique we use is the best in the industry.Some call tracking companies use a dedicated landing page for call tracking. In this method, people are taken from your PPC or organic link to a specific web page, and that web page has the special phone number on it. When people call that number, you know they’re coming from the specific search. But in order to know what keywords the visitor used in the search, you really do need a separate phone number for each keyword you want to track. And if a visitor decides to browse your site some more, they may be shown a different number, ruining your data.
Instead of a unique phone number, some tracking techniques assign users a unique code and then train their inbound sales department to ask for the code. Not only is this extra training you have to give your employees, but you have to hope they remember to do it right. Plus, asking for codes has the potential to disrupt the sales process and cost you customer goodwill.
Some web companies will tell you to collect data by getting customers to view another page on your website, either a coupon, thank-you page, or receipt, which will then be tracked by Google Analytics or other web tracking programs. This method loses a lot of data—most people won’t want to go to another page after they’ve concluded their business—and customers might be annoyed at the request.
Finally, brute force statistical analysis can be used instead of call tracking. If you have a really high call volume (tens of thousands in the data period of interest), you can analyze the data to get a pretty good idea of which searches are driving calls. Although this is an educated guess, it’s still just a guess. Plus, if your business were getting tens of thousands of calls a month, you would probably have other concerns to deal with first—like how you’re going to fill all those orders!
Case Study: Red Falcon Web Marketing
Now let’s see how this data can really make a difference for your business by looking at a real-world example. Red Falcon Web Marketing had call tracking for their clients, but it wasn’t working well. The data was incomplete, it was slow to arrive, and complicated to unpack.
They tolerated this as long as PPC wasn’t a big part of their marketing strategy. But as they began to put more money into PPC, they knew they needed conversion data from each campaign so they could show their clients tangible benefits in terms of ROI. Combining call tracking from CallRail with their own Google AdWords campaign, they were able to double the number of cases their clients were taking in.
Whether you are doing marketing for others or for your own business, tracking calls at the keyword level will give you actionable ROI data so you can refine your marketing efforts. Learn what a difference call tracking can make for your business today.
Powered by WPeMatico