You’re spending thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars a month on marketing your website — not to mention the thousands of dollars you’ve spent building and maintaining it. But is your site truly paying for itself, is it turning a profit? How do you know? What is the return on your investment?
Web analytic tools can measure traffic generated by different online marketing efforts (PPC ads, e-mail campaigns, social media, search engine optimization, etc.) and the conversions that happen as a result.
Yet what about offline conversions that take place over the telephone?
Once again, necessity has become the mother of invention with the arrival of dynamic call tracking software, where phone numbers display on a web page and change depending on how visitors are directed to the site. And by tracking and reporting on traffic — the sources that generated the calls — another important conversion factor can now be applied to web marketing campaigns efforts.
Following are five questions to consider when investing in a call tracking solution:
1. What exactly am I getting for my online ad spending?
Your organization is spending all or part of its budget on PPC advertising, website banner ads, e-mail marketing campaigns or search engine optimization. If website visitors are likely to call it’s important for you to see where they came from. In many cases, the phone call could be the only point of conversion as many users may simply call-in instead of completing your online contact form.
2. People call and you ask: How did they find us?
Ever wonder how many customers and potential customer calls came from your website. Did you ever scratch your head and think, “How did they find us on the web? We don’t advertise our site.” They may
have found you through a search engine like Google or Bing. The question is: Did they search on your company name, your product name, or another generic term? Without call tracking you can’t know this information. But with call tracking data, you can use it to continually update your site for better customer engagement. More importantly, you will be able to more effectively invest your PPC budget.
3. Why are people calling instead of searching online?
Are you curious about why people call you instead of finding the information on your website? Implementing a call tracking solution allows you to answer this question. Call tracking provides two mechanisms to help. First, standard reporting products provide you with the last page the visitor was on when he or she decided to call in (integrate your call tracking solution with web analytics tools and you could even see all of the pages they visited before the call) and by reviewing this page, you might be able to understand the reason why. More importantly call tracking products will record the call – allowing you the ability to review the purpose of the call and associate it with the specific page that generated the call. This is a great technique for helping improve checkout processes on e-commerce sites.
4. What if my customers don’t convert on the first visit to my website?
If your website is like most websites, many visitors won’t convert the first time they visit. They may be shopping around and checking out other sites before placing an order or perhaps calling to get additional information. The website visitor might actually write down your telephone number and call from their cell phone or home phone at a later time in the day. Once again, call tracking software can associate this phone call to the original source that brought the visitor to your site in the first place. This advanced, forward-thinking marketing measure is referred to as “Conversion Attribution.” Without a call tracking solution in place, this important data is lost.
5. Do you want to reach customers around the world or just down the block?
Everyone wants their website to look professional around the world and around the corner. Whether your business needs toll-free numbers to convey a national presence or local phone numbers to serve hyper-local communities, a good call tracking solution will provide both options. International businesses which want to connect to local communities in Los Angeles, Montreal or London can do so with either local or toll-free numbers displaying on their websites depending on specific marketing objectives. Clearly, toll-free numbers help your business appeal to a wider audience resulting in a greater number of potential customers. Conversely, local phone numbers are attractive to numerous customers who only feel comfortable doing business with people in their own backyards. Call tracking solutions which use local phone numbers are a natural fit for any business which receives geographically-oriented calls such as storage companies, auto dealerships, pizza parlors, hair salons and service professionals (doctors and lawyers).
While this paper only highlights the top five reasons to implement a call tracking solution, there are even more reasons which address specific vertical markets.
Tell us how you use call tracking to optimize your marketing spend.
