A website potentially has dozens of different interaction points you might want to measure. But in terms of what most clearly impacts your bottom line, let’s just think about core conversions: Potential clients see your ad, click the link, then visit your website. Some of them will fill out the contact form they saw when they visited–and a few of those folks will become paying customers.
Want to know if a marketing effort is worthwhile? It’s a simple matter of checking to see if the value of those core conversions exceeds what you spent on the digital advertising.
But what if a portion of your most valuable leads don’t fill out a contact form? What about situations where clients see the ad, click on it, check out your website–and then call you on the phone? Because they never filled out the webform, they’re totally indistinguishable from people who clicked and then bounced.
This is a huge blindspot. And it can result in stunningly bad business moves: Ad campaigns that are bringing you tons of new business over the phone might look like a total waste of money–after all, no one is filling out that webform. But stop “wasting money” on those ads, and suddenly the phones stop ringing.
This may seem like an unlikely scenario. But for B2B companies, the phone continues to be where much of the action happens. We’ve had clients running search engine ad campaigns where 75 percent of the leads end up calling on the phone–not emailing or using the online form.
If you don’t have a way to accurately attribute calls back to their original source, you can’t really figure out which of your marketing efforts is earning its keep.
Call Tracking Connects the Dots from Web to Phone
Surprisingly few businesses know about modern call-tracking platforms (which we touched on in this post announcing our first podcast episode). Call-tracking services use a snippet of code on your website (sprinkled with a pinch of web-browser pixie dust behind-the-scenes) to automatically attribute calls back to the online ad or web page the visitor was looking at when they called you.
These services don’t just shine light into the “phone call blindspot”; they tie together a huge number of really useful data points. Your call-tracking service will be able to track which page on your website or ad generated the interest that lead to the call, what type of computer or mobile device the caller used, where they were located, and often their name (just like caller ID). Most call-tracking services offer integrations for all of the popular CRM (customer relationship management) and analytics tools (like Google Analytics and Salesforce)–so these calls will automatically be properly attributed to the campaign that spurred them, and thus counted toward the click and conversion goals you’ve set.
But all of that is just the tip of the iceberg. In our next post, we’ll explore the advanced features that, if used properly, give even the most humble mom-n-pop shop the sorts of customer service and sales tools that, until a few years ago, were strictly the domain of global mega-corporations.
Can’t wait for that next installment? Want to chat now about how call tracking can give you visibility into who’s calling and why? We’re always happy to help! You can request a consultation on our website to get the conversation started.