Whether your small or medium-size business is local, national, B2B, or highly specialized, you already understand the necessity of offline marketing — print, broadcast, billboard, and direct advertising — and how critical each is to capturing the attention of customers. But how can you tell which medium is best for you? Which advertisements are working? Call tracking can help provide a cost-effective answer to marketing optimization.
If you’re trying to get people to call your number, you need to know as much as you can about what motivated them to call you. And if you’re driving potential customers to a website, you need to anticipate that as they get closer to converting, they’ll pick up the phone to place an order or ask a question.
Veteran web analyst Jason Cutroni notes the importance of understanding what’s driving the call: “Sure, you can see there are phone calls coming in, but if you’re spending money specifically to drive people to your website through different mar¬keting initiatives, and then get them to call you, you really need to understand, ‘I’ve got this many calls, is that good?’”
The more potential customers need to know, the more you need to know about them. Call tracking fills that need.
Marketing consultant and columnist Alan K’necht has seen his clients reap benefits from the technology: “Call tracking can help you by identifying more accurately which ads are working and driv-ing sales, versus ads that are driving the tire-kickers. Are those ads driving phone calls that go nowhere? Are those ads driving phone calls that then go on to convert? Once you gather that intelligence, you can then optimize based on additional customer tracking infor¬mation — what are the nature of these calls? What kind of questions are they asking? Can I modify my ads?”
Here’s how it works: every piece of advertising — billboard, radio ad, tv commercial, business card, refrigerator magnet – features a unique tracking number (toll-free or local), along with a unique, easily-remembered web address. If the ad triggers a phone call, the call is immediately logged to a web page, along with all the information about the call — customer location, duration of the call, and offline source.
If the ad triggers a web hit, the offline source is used to assign a dynamic, session-based phone number, and the user’s visit is then tracked and logged – then, if the user decided to pick up the phone to place an order or ask a question, the number called connects straight back to that original advertisement, business card, or trinket. In either case, once a call is completed (and optionally, recorded) the operator can log the results. The result is an easily-analyzed report, showing which sources resulted in which kinds of conversions.
Now you’ve got a record of exactly which sector drove which result — data that can guide your spending. Take them all together for a particular time, survey them using analytics tools — and a simple ROI calculator will furnish you with a comparison of all your advertising media. You’ll be able to see how many of each medium brought in each call.
Call tracking is simple to implement, inexpensive — and might just be indispensable at a time when budgets are strained and you need to make sure that you’re getting value for your advertising dollar. Once you see the numbers, you can determine whether that spike is due to that direct-mail campaign, the April broadcast buy, traffic around your billboard, or your daily newspaper ad.
Using call tracking is the most cost-efficient way to guide your advertising budget, especially if you’ve already committed to the phone contact. Knowing which medium is the likeliest to lead to conversions is the best way to ensure you’re getting the most bang for your advertising buck.
