Despite most marketers best efforts and the great lengths they go to with split testing, most of them are operating with incomplete data. A lot of this is due to them not taking things like phone calls into account. Last year about 77 billion calls were made to businesses from mobile devices and Invoca’s study also found that this accounted for 45% of all incoming calls to businesses. This article will explain the 4 steps to improve paid search ROI with call tracking.
1: Gather As Much Data As Possible
Gathering every piece of data that you can about a customer to understand their buying process has been a staple of the marketing world for a while. However people tend not to think about phone calls to a business as part of a marketing strategy. If you can’t keep track of phone calls then you can’t get any credit for the conversion and your analytics will be missing a huge portion which could help you better understand consumers buying patterns. You should set up a system for tracking calls. You should be tracking calls driven by paid searches, display ads and landing pages to give you an idea of which type of inbound calls are driving revenue.
2: Sync Your Data
Sync your new found call tracking data with that of your paid search data in analytics. Syncing all of the data you have available to you to get a much better idea of the buying process. This in turn allows you to tie revenue to the calls which helps you in optimising your methods for paid search marketing.
3: Cut Out False Positives
Call duration is usually a good way to tell if the call will lead to a conversion or not so this should be factored in as generally there would not be enough time for a conversion in a short phone call. You should also look for key terms so that you can be sure it’s a conversion and not customer support conversations.
4: Test & Adjust
Now that you have linked the ROI of online and offline conversions it’s time for testing. You need to test and adjust until you get the balance right where your ROI is optimal, all the while making sure your phone number and/or click to call buttons are visible to consumers.
This article has shown just how simple it can be to improve your ROI for Google Adwords paid search campaigns by tracking inbound calls and the conversions that come as a result of them. Use these methods for yourself and keep optimising your lead generation campaigns.