Gina Botti — January 18, 2017 To successfully optimize digital marketing ROI, marketers must do more than acknowledge the value of the call channel. They must also include call conversions in their marketing analytics.
The Value of Call Attribution
Call attribution technology can help you better understand your target audience and how they engage with your marketing campaigns and business. You acquire invaluable call data and insights before, during, and after a call. And when you digest this offline data alongside your important online conversions, such as clicks and impressions, you’ll have a more holistic understanding of your true cost per lead (CPL). As a result, you can feel more confident in how you allocate budget to boost ROI.
Let’s dive into the slew of complete, real-time data and insights that marketers can collect with the help of call attribution technology.
Know What Drove The Call
Every digital marketer wants to know if their budgets are being allocated to the right channels. They want to know if their campaigns are making a positive impact. Are they driving high-quality leads? Are they driving sales? And they especially want to know if their campaigns are doing more harm than good.
We now know that call conversions are occurring, whether we report on them or not is a different story. We also know that excluding call conversions creates a major black hole in your marketing analysis. This prevents you from collecting key insights that will help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and marketing channels.
Marketing Channel
See the true performance of each channel. Without call attribution, you might think that one channel is underperforming when in reality, it’s performing well because it’s driving more call conversions than online conversions. SnapCap incorporated call data into their reporting to see which marketing source drove every call. This helped them confidently allocate budget to the keywords, ads, and channels driving the most calls and customers. The result: 68% more call conversions without increasing their CPL.
Campaign & Ad
Determine which campaign or ad does a better job at driving certain types of conversions. Let’s say you’re looking to drive business locally. Did you know over 50% of on-the-go searches have local intent? Or that those searchers are very likely to call to inquire about a product or service before visiting in-store? And when you’re running mobile ads along with desktop ads, your audience will be different. For instance, your mobile ads will only be seen by people on smartphones. And since a smartphones is still a phone, without call attribution technology you won’t know if your mobile ads are driving offline call conversions.
Search Keywords
Know which keyword or group of keywords drive consumers to click or call. This is especially important if you’re using Google call extensions or call-only ads. You can gain accurate keyword-level attribution with call attribution technology, so you know which keyword is driving calls and customers. This safeguards you against bidding on keywords that do not perform well. It protects your CPL. Sylvan Learning Center tracks phone call conversions and online conversions together. This combination of online and offline data helps them to make stronger optimization decisions. They’ve grown their leads from search marketing by over 33% while keeping cost per lead flat.
Email or Direct Mail
More people are reading emails on their mobile devices (35% more, to be precise). This means they can make calls to your business while reading your emails. You can use a trackable number within your email should an email recipient opt to call rather than shop online. And if they were to click through to your website, you can track your mobile visitors’ activity throughout your website by using dynamic number insertion (DNI). You can still give credit to the email campaign that drove any call conversions after multiple touch points on your website. And the same goes for your direct mail pieces.
Webpages Visited
Understand the path your callers took before placing the call. Perhaps they clicked on one of your paid search ads that directed them to a special landing page, but then clicked over to your products page before opting to call after viewing a specific product. You now know their original point of entry, what pages they viewed and the content on the pages that interested them before they took their customer journey offline to buy over the phone. Without call attribution, your analytics would tell you that this user clicked on your search ad, but never converted.
Understand The Call and Caller
There’s a wealth of data you can collect once you get someone on the line. From understanding who the caller is to when, why, and how a call occurs is incredibly invaluable. Not only will you get the caller’s name, past call activity, and phone number, but you’ll also learn:
- Geographic Location: Are you getting more calls in a certain area of the country? This might tell you to cut down on your desktop ads and increase spend on mobile.
- OS & Browser: Do calls occur more frequently when your target audience is on a specific browser? Are you allocating budgets to drive calls on the wrong browsers?
- Day & Time of Call: Knowing when calls are happening can be extremely helpful for your sales agents. Which day receives the most calls? Do you get more calls in the morning? Your campaigns could be driving quality calls, but if they aren’t converting to a sale then it could be indicative of poor staffing. This might show you that you need to set up an IVR to route callers to different locations that are best suited to handle certain callers.
Gain Insights From The Conversation
Every call provides a wealth of data that tells you which calls are good and which calls are bad. When you know what happens on every call, you can use this data to optimize your marketing to drive the calls you want while eliminating programs that aren’t generating the right calls to your call center or branches. You can also determine if your agents are referencing certain promotions.
How is this even possible without listening to hours of conversations? Simple. Gaining insights on sales conversations allows you to search conversations based on keywords that you deem important. They could be keywords used in your paid search. They could be keywords for specific promotions or words of value, such as “appointment.” When you understand what happens during the calls that are being generated by your marketing, you gain invaluable insights into the types of leads you’re driving, how you could improve your marketing ROI, and ways to enhance the performance of your sales agents.
We’ve only just seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to call attribution. Are you interested in learning how many top CMOs and executive leaders are leveraging call data and insights to improving their marketing ROI? Download The Digital Marketer’s Guide to Call Attribution.
Digital & Social Articles on Business 2 Community(53)
