Jane Intrieri
In 2014 alone, marketers spent 26 percent more on paid search than in 2013 (Target Marketing). What’s more, a recent study conducted by StrongView found that nearly 40 percent of marketers surveyed would have an increased budget for paid search in 2015.
It’s no surprise that marketing teams are continuing, year after year, to invest more money into paid search and display – it’s arguably the easiest way to generate conversions and leads from your target audience. With paid search budgets growing so quickly, it’s more important than ever to demonstrate how spend is converting into leads.
As part of our 2014 reporting, we completed an analysis of our own internal paid search data. One objective of this report was to better understand how paid search traffic converts on the Ifbyphone website. To do this, we tracked the following metrics from all paid search sources:
- Total conversions from paid search in Q3 2014
- Total number of web form submissions (online conversions)
- Total number of phone calls (offline conversions)
The results were not surprising, however they were very telling of the importance of conversion tracking for online AND offline leads from paid search. Here is what we found:
- Thirty-nine percent of our paid search conversions were web form fills.
- Sixty-one percent of our Q3 paid search conversions were phone calls.
- Had we not been using call tracking on our paid search landing pages, our conversion rate would have appeared 50 percent lower than it actually was.
- Our total CPA without phone call data would have appeared nearly 3x greater than our actual CPA.
Excluding phone call data from our end of quarter reports would have given us false numbers on conversion rates, total leads generated from paid search, and most importantly – ROI. Had we not been able to prove that our spend on paid search was producing a positive ROI, our Q4 budget would have been reduced, which subsequently would have slashed the number of leads our sales team receives.
Had we not been using conversion tracking for offline leads in addition to online, our data would have been highly inaccurate, possibly leading to a reduced budget and increased scrutiny of our paid search activities.
To learn more about how your marketing team can use call tracking to track online and offline conversions from paid search, download the guide, “Marketer’s Guide to Call Tracking for Google SEO and PPC,” or request a demo of Ifbyphone today.
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