Mongoose MetricsConversion & Call Tracking Blog

How valuable are phone calls to your business?

If a significant percentage of your customer base converts offline, keyword call tracking is a necessary tool for understanding:

• Which keywords drive the most phone calls?
• Which keywords deliver the least phone calls?

With these two answers firmly in hand you can quickly and efficiently adjust keyword spending in real-time for significant savings.

David Jaeger, director of SEM for NationalPositions.com, has this to say, “We just saved a client $10,000 per month off of their PPC spending by implementing keyword call tracking from Mongoose Metrics. The data we received from Mongoose immediately showed our client, a prominent DUI attorney who spends more than $50,000 per month on PPC advertising, how to optimize PPC as well as SEO by revealing the keywords, times of day as well as the geo-locations driving the most phone calls.

“Essentially, call tracking helps clients realize that their Internet marketing “expense” is truly an Internet marketing “investment.” Our philosophy focuses on getting clients to think about not just what they are spending but what their ad budgets are returning, and call tracking has been integral to our success in helping numerous businesses attain exponential ROI. Overall, it’s really a valuable service.”

How it Works

Call tracking dynamically inserts a unique phone number (local or toll-free) on a web page which relates back to the source (in this case, keyword) which generated the website visit. More than a dozen data points are then collected and populated in the Mongoose customer dashboard.

The following screenshots depict data from one of Mongoose’s own campaigns:

The geeks descended on Austin, Texas in droves for the 2011 South by Southwest interactive festival this week where an estimated 15,000 attendees laden with the latest technology gadgets and big ideas congregated for one of the world’s largest tech meetups. With hundreds of sessions ranging from, “How Not to be a Douchebag at South by Southwest,” to “Match.com and Foursquare Sitting in a Tree,” the crowds got their fill from influencers such as Google’s Marissa Mayer, content strategist David Meerman Scott and media maven Tim O’Reilly.

In between parties sponsored by Chevrolet, Razorfish, HP, ebay and dozens of others, the tech-set lined up at Starbucks, mobbed the massive gaming hall and descended on Apple’s surprise pop-up store to buy the iPad 2.

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.

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 ques¬tions 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 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 advertis¬ing 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.

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.

The great thing about pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, aside from the opportunity to get placement near the top of search engine result pages (SERPs) for targeted keywords, is that within a short time (usually 1-2 weeks) you can tell exactly how a campaign is performing.

Both Google and Bing offer metrics that digital marketing agencies use to evaluate a campaign’s ability to drive quality traffic. These metrics include click through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and average position in results, among others.

But how do you track success after PPC visitors are on your site? What metrics should you look at to ensure that you are generating quality traffic and capitalizing on conversion opportunities?

For these performance metrics, you have to turn to web analytics. Following are four data points that you should review daily to evaluate PPC campaign performance beyond SERPs.

1. Conversions

While it may go without saying, conversions are the best metric to determine how a PPC campaign is performing.

It’s important to have your web analytics set up to capture both online conversions (web form submissions, content downloads, eNewsletter subscriptions) and offline conversions (phone calls).

To track online conversions, configure your web analytics to record a conversion every time someone arrives on a specific URL. In the case of web forms, this URL would be the lead-form thank you page. For downloads, you may have to add a piece of tracking code that will register the download as a pageview.

To track offline conversions, integrate a call tracking solution that records all incoming calls and associates them with a specific campaign, ad group and/or keyword. There are a number of solutions available today that will integrate directly into your web analytics program so you only have to access one dashboard.

2. Pages Per Visit

With pages per visit, the extremes (high and low) are the most telling of any problem areas:

Low pages per visit (1 to 2) without a conversion — This could mean that visitors aren’t finding the content useful, and are opting to go back to the search results to find a more relevant site.

High pages per visit (varies) with or without a conversion — This may signify that visitors have to go looking for the information their interested in.

In both cases, review the relevance of the page content to traffic-producing keywords, and make sure the information people appear to be seeking is on the landing page, or a click away.

3. Average Time on Site

With average time on site, you should be working to avoid this metric’s lower extremes:

Extremely low (0-1 second) — There is no way to read a page’s content in this amount of time. If there are a lot of visitors spending less than a second on the site, it may be the result of one of two things:

• Invalid clicks – Check with your PPC platform to ensure you are not being charged for these.

• Slow site load time – May cause people to get frustrated and hit the back button before ever arriving on your site.

Low (less than 15 seconds) — Generally speaking, those visitors who spent 10 seconds or less on a site quickly determined that they were in the wrong place. This may be because at first glance they didn’t find any relevant information, see their keywords anywhere on the page, or were confused by the landing page’s layout.

4. Bounce Rate

A bounce is when someone lands on a site and leaves without viewing any other pages.

A good bounce rate is going to vary depending on the campaign, but generally if you can keep it below 50 percent your doing OK. A high bounce rate may be an indication that your content is not relevant or engaging to visitors.

Possible Fixes:

Following are some adjusts you can make to your campaign’s landing pages that may help to improve the metrics above:

• Rewrite headlines to include the keywords you’re bidding on.

• Include images to draw the eye to important information.

• Format your content so that it can be easily scanned — use bullets, short paragraphs and subheads where possible.

• Test different content and messages to see which resonates best with visitors.

• Try different landing page layouts to see if one converts better than another.

• Make sure there is a clear call to action.

• Test both a phone number and a web form as calls to action, since certain audiences prefer different means of communication.

• Add or remove the navigation bar — too much navigation may be a distraction.

• Evaluate your landing page’s relevance to the campaign’s keyword bids and ad copy.

• Review keywords for strange, unrelated meanings that may be driving highly unqualified traffic.

If these metrics don’t improve, it may be worth revisiting your campaign to ensure your website content, offers, messaging and calls to action align with your audience’s search intent and expectations.

What key metrics do you use to gauge the performance of your PPC campaigns? Please share in the comments section below.

In December, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a 79-page report [PDF] outlining a Do Not Track initiative designed to help Internet users better protect their privacy. On Friday, Feb. 11, the “Do Not Track Me Online” bill was introduced in Congress.

Do Not Track

According to New York Times journalists Edward Wyatt and Tanzina Vega, “Many of the problems the FTC is trying to tackle involve third parties that use technology to surreptitiously follow a user around the web, collecting data and then selling it, usually without the user’s knowledge.”

The Do Not Track report introduced in December recommends allowing web surfers to opt out of online tracking by activating a web-browser control that blocks third-party cookies. Firefox (Mozilla), Chrome (Google) and Internet Explorer (Microsoft) have all announced plans to integrate this type of feature into their next browser versions.

Do Not Track will have a negative impact on many advertisers who rely on an individual’s web history to show more targeted ads. These are known as contextual and behavioral ads, and according to Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, made up about $12.1 billion in ad spend in the first half of 2010.

Mike Zaneis, senior vice president and general counsel of the IAB, says the online advertising industry would suffer “significant economic harm” if the government controlled the do-not-track mechanism and there was “a high participation rate similar to that of do not call.” (source: New York Times)

What does the bill mean for consumers and marketers?

If it is correctly constructed, Do Not Track could be a positive force for the consumer and the industry. The correct scope is to weed out people who are selling personal information or using such tracking for illegal purposes.

However, blocking all third-party cookies is not the correct solution. More so than advertising, the biggest uses of third-party cookies are in the website analytics space where companies place code from providers such as Google Analytics on their websites to measure and improve visitor interaction. Making sure to protect such uses is essential to improving consumer experience.

Many companies rely on the information from web tracking to improve their customer experience, so it is important to protect that feedback loop from specious legislation.

We’ve been bumping up against an issue with Twitter mentions recently so we reached out to the folks at HootSuite for an explanation. Maybe you’re having the same issue. Here it is in a nutshell:

Many of our followers mention and retweet our content. We’re thankful and we’d like to respond. Although it’s impossible when those mentions/retweets don’t show up in our mentions column within Twitter or HootSuite.  Here’s HootSuite’s response:

“We appreciate your patience. Before addressing this issue in depth, we first want to clarify what the Mentions column is. HootSuite’s Mentions column is designed to display everything you would see if you viewed your @Mentions within your Twitter account. If you log into Twitter, click “Home”, then click @Mentions, you should see exactly what you would see in HootSuite’s Mentions column — there should be no variance.

With that said, you may notice that when you do a search for your username in Twitter, you see mentions that do not appear either in HootSuite’s Mentions column or in Twitter.com’s Mentions view. In fact, Twitter does not regard these messages as Mentions; they regard them as Native Retweets.

As opposed to manually adding an “RT @username” in front of a message, a Twitter Web Retweet is created by clicking the Retweet button on Twitter.com. HootSuite also has this option for retweets, although it is not our default. When you use Twitter.com or HootSuite, recognizing a Twitter Web Retweet is easy — they are accompanied by a Retweet symbol.

Unfortunately, Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com) displays Twitter Web Retweets without the retweet symbol. Instead, they’re displayed the same way as a manual retweet (“RT @username”). How they display on Twitter Search, and how they display on HootSuite as well as Twitter.com are very different. This is why the retweet by @SeanMcGinnis showed up in your #usguys column, and not your Mentions column.

The reason this message did not show up in “Your Tweets, Retweeted” was because, strictly speaking, this was not your retweet. Rather, this was @SeanMcGinnis retweeting himself using the Twitter Web Retweet method. If he manually retweeted that message, it would have shown up in your Mentions.

We do acknowledge that the difference between a “manual” retweet and a Twitter Web Retweet is confusing. However, our aim is to be as faithful as possible to Twitter’s API, and to display information exactly as our userbase would view this information on Twitter.com. If you have additional questions about the variance between your search columns and your Mentions columns, please let us know.”

Thanks, HootSuite, for the explanation.