In a frenetic, multi-channel advertising world,
three goals remain constant:
1) Increasing Sales
2) Reducing Costs
3) Improving Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
With web analysis, acquiring the data to do those things is relatively simple. What you may not know is that the same sophistication has come to call tracking.
It’s now possible to survey every telephone call your online and offline marketing activities generate — to see who is calling, what brought them to your site, where they’ve been, and what they wanted to know. If you rely on phone calls, it may be time for you to listen to who’s calling, and why.
How do these tools work?
As soon as a visitor comes to your call-tracking-enabled website, the source that brought them there — Google, Bing, social media, keyword, banner ad, television spot or direct entry — is documented and attached to a dynamic, session-based phone number.
When the visitor uses that number to make a phone call, the information is logged into customizable reports that integrate with any number of web analytics providers such as Webtrends, Omniture/Adobe Site Catalyst and Google Analytics.
An enterprise that doesn’t have the tools to survey the calls its online and offline efforts generate may be allowing potential sales to fall through the cracks.
Failure to understand how well advertising campaigns are functioning can cause wasted spending on ads that don’t drive results — resources that might be used more intelligently. And the deep data that call tracking provides can help guide the design and implementation of a site in a way that enhances customer experience and encourages return visits.
For the vast majority of online sellers, the phone call is an important nexus, even a critical one.
Are phone calls missing from your analytics reports? Then it’s likely you don’t know which keywords or banner ads are producing call conversions — which might be an expensive blind spot. Knowing that – on paper — certain ads may look as though they’re not generating the appropriate response — is a mistake.
Web analytics tools are apt to become useless once a user decides to phone in to place an order or to find out more.
Spend Better to Convert Higher
The bottom line is, of course, the bottom line. For a relatively small cost, enterprises which use call tracking are seeing results.
Call tracking is a whole new game. The old-school call tracking was, ‘Here’s a phone number, we’ll tell you somebody called you, and we’ll give you their caller ID.’
The new school of call tracking is: ‘Somebody called you — we’ll give you all the information we can possibly glean about why they got to you, how they got to you — web, direct mail, billboard, radio, television — along with identifying information.
For a nominal fee every month, a company should be able to increase the ROI of their marketing by 20-30 percent. They’re going to be able to decrease their spend a bit, and going to be able to spend better on things that convert higher – thus producing a 20-30 percent increase in ROI for basically a nickel-dime type spend increase to add a call analytic service.
It’s a pretty low investment in technology to get a huge return that can transform a business.
Tell us about your experience with call tracking.
Bravo! And while much of the speculation circles around how businesses will integrate social media assets into customer history dashboards, web analytics and CRM systems, there’s one very powerful – yet often overlooked – customer touch point which is crucial for many types of businesses to fully understand.
