Call Tracking Shines a Light on Previously Hidden Data
I spoke last evening at the Seattle Direct Marketing Association’s May meeting, on the topic of Call Tracking & Analytics. Our call tracking provider, Marchex Voicestar, had asked me to join them at the event and present our client case study.
Leigh McMillan & Brent Turner of Marchex Voicestar
Brent Turner, EVP of Call Products for Marchex, opened by presenting research showing that 65% of marketers say phone calls are their most valued lead source. It makes sense – having a prospect call you, ask questions, and have any of their objections handled immediately, typically makes for a much warmer lead than someone who fills out an online form. You may or may not ever reach them later, and their desire for your product or service may have waned by then or been taken care of by a competitor.
Interestingly, however, only 5% of advertisers use any type of call analytics. This means that, while phone calls are highly valued, 95% of companies can’t track which marketing effort is driving their inbound calls. This is hard to understand, especially since phone call tracking is so easy to implement and so affordable.
Stacy Williams presents at the Seattle Direct Marketing Association
My case study was for a Prominent Placement client in the home services industry. We had pulled out all our usual stops – we optimized their website for targeted search terms, we built a comprehensive pay-per-click campaign for them, and we had our usability expert ensure that the site and landing pages encouraged visitors to fill out the online lead form.
We were all stymied when this didn’t seem to be working. Oh, we achieve high organic and paid rankings, all right, as well as a large increase in site visitors from search engines. But the client wasn’t receiving the volume of online leads that we typically generate, and that, of course, is the goal of all our efforts.
However, the client did note that the phone seemed to be ringing off the hook. We wanted to see if the perceived increase in calls was due to our search marketing efforts.
Using Marchex Voicestar’s technology, we replaced the client’s real phone number on their website and PPC landing pages with dynamically-generated phone numbers. That is, a visitor who clicked on a Google organic listing would see one phone number, someone who clicked on a Google PPC ad would see a second number, Yahoo organic listings displayed a third number, etc. Callers were instantly forwarded to the client’s real phone number to be assisted as usual, but Marchex tracked the source of each call. (And recorded them – that’s another benefit that’ll be the subject of a future post.)
Everyone was surprised to learn that 71% of all search engine-generated leads came in via phone – only 29% came in via online form. For this client, that made sense, as they provide the kind of service that people have a lot of questions about. Potential customers apparently felt a comfort level in speaking with someone from the company who could address their concerns.
Before we were able to determine the source of the calls, we were making decisions based on 29% of the available data. Now that we had 100% of the available data, we discovered that the true return on investment for our PPC campaign was much higher than we had thought. With this knowledge, we increased our bids by 22%. This resulted in doubling the number of leads for the client – a true win-win for everyone.
We were generating more than triple the number of leads we had previously realized. Selfishly, as an agency, we always want to be able to take credit for everything we’re generating. And if that allows us to make smarter decisions on behalf of our clients, generating more customers and revenue for them, that’s what makes this business truly rewarding.
