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Track Mobile Advertising Campaign Conversions with Call Tracking and Web Analytics

Smartphone adoption continues to explode with the ever-improving advancements in mobile technology. The introduction of faster networks and phones, greater data sharing capabilities and better user interfaces have enabled smartphones to dominate the mobile market.

According to a May 2011 report from comScore Inc., 76.8 million Americans use smartphones — 11 million more users than the previous three-month period. Additionally, Nielsen’s May survey of U.S. consumers concluded that 38 percent of all mobile consumers now own smartphones.

More companies are integrating mobile advertising into their marketing campaigns in response to consumer behavior and trends.. In fact, comScore Inc. reported that spending on mobile advertising in the U.S. is projected to reach $2.5 billion by 2014.

Mobile advertising offers companies the ability to reach busy consumers.. Using web analytics and call tracking, marketers can find the data needed to track consumer behavior and conversion rates, and evolve their campaigns to be more effective for targeting mobile audiences.

Mobile Advertising and Marketing Tactics

The following provides details on three common mobile advertising/marketing options, and how to effectively track results.

Mobile display ads

Display advertising strategically places a company’s ad and a concise call to action among relevant content — e.g. within an app, video or mobile site. Mobile display ads consist of text, logos, images, banners or maps whichdirect a user to the company site, conversion form or phone number.

Similar to desktop advertising, mobile display ads are tracked by web analytics and call tracking systems which monitor the conversion rates of individual ads.

While web analytics will provide you with information on visitor behavior and click through patterns, the call tracking number associated with a campaign will capture a caller’s mobile conversion source and other relevant information. Together, these tools will provide you with lead details needed to track campaign effectiveness and improve sales follow up.

Mobile PPC

Mobile PPC, or pay-per-click, is used for mobile search advertising. According to Google, mobile search queries represent approximately 15 percent of all search volume, and continue to grow at a rapid pace. In response to this growing opportunity, advertisers are turning to mobile PPC campaigns.

Click-to-call functionality makes mobile PPC particularly convenient and effective for mobile searchers seeking immediate information. However, to properly evaluate the results of your campaign, you should consider integrating call tracking into your PPC ads and web analytics and call tracking on the designated landing page(s).

Mobile Text Messaging (SMS)

Text message campaigns are used by a range of organizations to connect with audiences on the go, providing customers with easy access to relevant information.

For example, Scotts Miracle-Gro’s SMS campaign provides mobile users with a short-code texting option that automatically sends tips on lawn care, and upon activation requests an email address for delivery of the campaign newsletter. In essence, Scotts has leveraged mobile marketing efforts to further engage its customer base and drive email subscriptions.

Additionally, local and service-based businesses can include call tracking numbers within mobile SMS campaigns to better track customers who then make appointments or reservations, purchase tickets, cash in on special offers, or simply call with questions.

Tracking Mobile Campaign Performance

Smartphones offer users the accessibility to surf the web, find information relevant to their needs and take immediate action, such as access a website or call a local business or hotline. With effective mobile campaigns in place, along with data from analytics and call tracking tools, you can properly evaluate your efforts and capitalize on this fast-growing marketplace.

Have you integrated mobile into your advertising and marketing campaigns? If so, what have you found effective for monitoring conversion rates and overall success?

Additional Resources:

Call Tracking / Integration / Search Marketing — No Comments
14
Apr 11

Mongoose Metrics “Closed Loop Marketing Overview” on Marketing Pilgrim

Sharing best practices about the vast topic of Internet marketing makes us all warm and fuzzy inside.

That’s why we were delighted with Andy Beal’s establishment of the Marketing Pilgrim’s Writer’s Garage. It’s a place where Internet marketing writers can hone their craft while educating the masses about their specific topic of expertise. As an added bonus, the best posts at the Marketing Garage are sometimes elevated to Marketing Pilgrim’s main blog for greater exposure.

On March 24, 2011, our post “A Closed Loop Marketing Overview” was featured on Marketing Pilgrim’s main blog. In it, we extoll the valuable steps Internet marketers must take to assure they track website visitors from the time they arrive at the website, to when they convert into a lead, and through to becoming a customer.

Excerpt: How to Establish Closed-Loop Conversion Tracking:

To enable closed-loop conversion tracking, Internet marketers need a constant stream of real-time performance data to understand campaign effectiveness, and identify opportunities to improve lead quality and volume. Specifically, they need to analyze:

Website Activity – Web analytics track and record traffic source, bounce rate, time on site, pageviews, pages per visit and exit pages.

Online and Offline Conversions – Web analytics also track web form completions and online purchases, and call tracking solutions record phone leads.

Lead-to-Customer Conversions – CRM systems collect and organize lead intelligence, and track leads that convert into customers and the revenue they generate.

Read the full post on Marketing Pilgrim.

Tell us how you track conversions from click to close.

Call Tracking / Features, Tips, & Announcements / Integration — No Comments
30
Mar 11

Track All of Your Conversions in One Place

One business. One dashboard.

The solution for tracking online conversions in the same dashboard with offline (phone) conversions is now a reality. Our recent partnership with ion interactive, providers of LiveBall, a cloud-based landing page software platform, allows clients to integrate call tracking data alongside online conversion data for a full and accurate conversion picture.

By combining both online and offline data, marketers gain a deeper understanding into how their marketing efforts are driving conversions to make more informed campaign adjustments.

When you inject call tracking data into the LiveBall platform, you can:

Automatically track phone calls as conversions.
Optimize online creative based on phone tracking data.
See conversion reporting of phone calls in real-time alongside lead generation data.

This integration is accomplished with Javascript provided by Mongoose Metrics. When a respondent visits your web page, the script triggers a dynamic phone number which replaces the “base.” When a respondent calls this phone number, a conversion (or tag) is tracked back to LiveBall. The conversion populates LiveBall performance gauges and reporting. Ion interactive provides full set-up details for LiveBall clients in their support center.

At the core, combining these two data silos in a simple, accessible and easy-to-use platform like LiveBall allows multiple team members — from the CEO and CMO to data analysts, graphic designers and ad buyers — to access a powerful data set in real-time in which to make daily business decisions.

Tell us: What business intelligence systems do you use to integrate marketing data?

Call Tracking — 1 Comment
29
Mar 11

Using Google Call Metrics to Evaluate Your Call Tracking Needs

As we wrote in a recent Marketing Pilgrim post, call tracking is one of three essential pieces to closed-loop marketing conversion tracking. In partnership with web analytics and a CRM system, call tracking can complete the lead-conversion puzzle by tracking offline conversions, and help marketers understand which campaigns are generating the greatest ROI.

For Google AdWords advertisers on the fence over whether or not to invest in a full call tracking solution, Google’s Call Metrics (a Google AdWords call tracking extension) offers a fairly easy, and free, way to assess your need.

Google Call Metrics

On March 22, Search Engine Land reported on a case study Google recently published touting the ability of Call Metrics to boost pay-per-click (PPC) conversions. According to the case study, a large financial-services company saw an increase of 29 percent in incoming calls and a 17-percent boost in conversions by integrating tracking phone numbers into its ads.

While this information is highly useful for campaign optimization, it is also indicative of a larger call tracking need.

Google Call Metrics only tracks calls from individuals that viewed an ad on search-results pages. It doesn’t track the number of calls the company received after a visitor clicked on the ad and arrived on the landing page, nor calls that resulted from Bing PPC traffic, or any other marketing campaign for that matter.

How to Get Started:

To get started evaluating your call tracking needs with Google Call Metrics, read the following Search Engine Land post that provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up Google Call Metrics, as well as other ad extensions. Google Call Metrics is free to try for the time being.

Please note: This feature may not be available on your account yet because it is in limited release, but you can petition Google to include the option on your account.

Once activated, look at the number of incoming calls, which may be as few as one or two a week depending on your ad spend, industry or product/service.

If your ads are generating calls, it’s probably safe to assume that your landing pages, are also driving phone conversions, and you may have a need for a call tracking solution.

What Next?

Once you’ve established that you have a need, here are five steps to help you start your search for a call tracking solution.

Remember, by capturing offline conversion data, you’re completing the lead-conversion picture. The more accurate this picture, the better armed you are to make effective campaign updates that can improve performance and boost ROI.

What are some other ways to determine whether a campaign could benefit from a call tracking?

Call Tracking / Features, Tips, & Announcements — No Comments
22
Mar 11

Has Call Tracking Transformed Your Business? Tell us and win an iPad.

Satisfied call tracking clients often tell us how call tracking has completely optimized their marketing spending. If this is the case for your business we’d love to hear about it.

Tell us your Call Tracking Success Story and win an iPad

All responses will be entered into a random drawing to win one of two iPads. We will announce the winners here on the Mongoose Metrics blog on June 30, 2011.

How to enter (do one of the following):

Send an email to our director of marketing and content, Kathleen Colan (kathleen.colan@mongoosemetrics.com) describing your experience with Mongoose Metrics call tracking.
Write a blog post about your experience and send us the link.
Upload a video to YouTube and share the link with us.

All entries must be received by June 27 to be eligible to participate in the random drawing for one of two iPads.

All submissions become the property of Mongoose Metrics and may be featured on our Customer Testimonials page or in other content.

Features, Tips, & Announcements / Search Marketing — No Comments
22
Mar 11

Mongoose Metrics at Search Engine Strategies New York 2011 – Booth 2305

The Mongoose Metrics team has landed in Manhattan for the annual jamboree of online marketers known as SES — Search Engine Strategies taking place today through March 24. We’re always delighted to reconnoiter with the best minds in search and share our knowledge about tracking offline conversions resulting from online search.

Here’s four ways to engage with us at the conference:

Stop by booth #2305 and meet with our knowledgeable team lead by Rob Bisker, Drew Johnson and Matt Staton.
Keep up with the knowledge stream by following the conference hashtag on Twitter with #SESNY.
Follow us on Twitter @mongoosemetrics for a curated stream of the best intel from SES speaker sessions.
Call or email Rob Bisker to set up a meeting: rob.bisker@mongoosemetrics.com, 216.225.7449.

Read more about the Top Five Reasons to learn about call tracking.

Analytics / Search Marketing / Social Media — 1 Comment
22
Dec 10

Social Selling with Promoted Tweets

As marketers struggle for answers and often prognosticate about how to convert social media efforts into real relationships and sales opportunities, we’ve found success with one of the newest and hottest – yet highly debated – methods on the planet at the close of 2010.

Yes, we’re talking about Twitter’s much-lauded Promoted Tweets advertising platform which launched a mere two months ago on Nov. 1.

As one of Twitter’s 20 beta testers for Promoted Tweets, Mongoose Metrics has aggressively tested the platform in a number of ways detailed below. For example, we’re currently running 14 distinct campaigns. See details and screenshots from our first 3 weeks in the blog post “Top 10 Things We Learned from Twitter’s Promoted Tweets.”

Recently, on Dec. 14, Twitter added a form to its website where companies can express interest in purchasing Promoted Tweets as well as Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends. We’ve been told the program will begin rolling out publicly sometime at the end of January or beginning of February 2011.

We’d also like to note that Twitter – much like Google – has been less than forthcoming about how their algorithms work. In other words, at the present time, there is no guidebook.

What We Know So Far – The Basics

You can run multiple campaigns based on key terms that relate to the content you’re promoting in Tweets.

Bidding on these terms is competitive and begins at $.10 per engagement. An engagement is defined as a Retweet, a Favorite, a Reply or a Click.

Currently we’re seeing some bidding competition on key terms such as SEO. The base bid for SEO is currently defaulted at $1.00 even though there has been very little competition on the term.

Tweets must be Tweeted organically before they can be designated in a Promoted Tweets campaign. We’re not particularly fond of this method as it forces us to Tweet out self-promotional Tweets each time we refresh a campaign.

Tweet fatigue is ambiguous at this point. Twitter tells us that a Promoted Tweet will be shown to a user a maximum of five times before it is removed by Twitter from rotation. Analytics and details on this process are non-existent. For example, some days show a major spike in impressions and engagement for no apparent reason.

The Results

As we mentioned in our first blog post about Promoted Tweets in Nov., Promoted Tweets has delivered conversions, followers and an improved Klout score. Since Nov. 1, we have received:

961,000 Tweet Impressions
18,000 Clicks
220 Retweets
168 Replies
126 Conversions
Cost = $2067

Conclusion

Promoted Tweets is a valid marketing method for generating conversions as well as brand awareness.

Call Tracking / PPC / Search Marketing / Social Media — No Comments
10
Dec 10

Call Tracking Goes Mainstream with Google, Promoted Tweets & Mongoose Metrics

2010 was a big year for call tracking. Here’s a rundown of the highlights:

By far, the biggest advancement in 2010 was Google’s entry into the call tracking space with their Nov. 2 announcement of Google Adwords Call Analytics. The basic concept of the Google Adwords Call Analytics reporting platform works much the same way as many existing call tracking services. In Google’s offering, a limited set of data points are logged and recorded within the Adwords account dashboard. Of course, Google’s call tracking product tracks only one source: Google Adwords. More sophisticated solutions, including Mongoose Metrics, track phone calls from other search engines, organic traffic, social media, email and traditional advertising sources.

“We see Google’s entry into call tracking as an inflection point for the entire industry. Essentially, Google has validated call tracking’s promise of delivering the missing piece in the online marketing analytics puzzle,” says Bradley E. Reynolds, chief executive officer for Mongoose Metrics.

2010 also saw the adoption of speech analytics technologies by many call tracking vendors, including Mongoose Metrics. Mongoose Metrics launched Conversation Conversion Dynamics, a speech recognition technology to assess real-time ROI. CCD is an overlay feature on top of call tracking which records every move web-to-phone visitors take to reveal patterns of actions and behaviors.

Additionally, Mongoose Metrics introduced a number of features to enhance the call tracking experience for customers including a reverse proxy server, API and PCI compliance. The company also began providing service to Canada and the United Kingdom.

Integrating call tracking data with bid management providers, web analytics companies and CRM software packages also became de rigueur in 2010 especially for highly technological companies such as Mongoose Metrics. In 2010 Mongoose Metrics partnered with a number of leading web analytics and bid management powerhouses including Kenshoo, Marin, Acquisio, Unilytics and SearchIgnite. “By partnering with the leaders in bid management and web analytics we’ve been able to share the power of call tracking data with more sophisticated marketing professionals than ever before,” Reynolds says.

And, finally, to top off 2010, Twitter chose Mongoose Metrics (@mongoosemetrics) as one of only 20 beta testers in the world for its newly launched Promoted Tweets beta advertising platform. Promoted Tweets launched on Nov. 1 and since then Mongoose has significantly increased conversions, followers and Klout.

Analytics / Call Tracking / Examples / PPC / Search Marketing — No Comments
29
Nov 10

Google Adwords Call Analytics Explained & Compared w/ Mongoose Metrics Call Tracking

Tracking phone calls just got simpler for millions of Google Adwords users who want to understand how their PPC campaigns perform for delivering phone calls.

With Google’s Nov. 2 announcement about Google Adwords Call Analytics, the call tracking industry has been elevated alongside traditional web analytics providers as another trusted resource in the fast-growing field of marketing analytics.

“If you’re new to call tracking, using Google’s call tracking is a good place to start,” says Mongoose Metrics chief executive officer, Bradley Reynolds. But the technology only goes so far.

Of course, it only tracks one marketing source: Google Adwords, where more robust call tracking solutions offer insight into ALL your traffic sources including organic, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, display advertising, email marketing as well as traditional print and broadcast advertising.

The basic concept of the Google Adwords Call Analytics reporting platform works much the same way as many existing call tracking services. Google injects a unique call tracking phone number into the advertisement (in this case a PPC ad) and routes the resulting call (via VOIP) to the business. In Google’s offering, a limited set of data points are logged and recorded within the Adwords account dashboard.

Here’s a screenshot from Greg Sterling’s ScreenWerk blog post, “Free Call Tracking Comes to Adwords, PPCall Can’t Be Far Behind.”

To further amplify the concept, Surojit Chatterjee, senior product manager for Adwords, explains, “When a user calls the number in your ad, the call is automatically routed to your business, and AdWords notes that this call took place. Then, when you look at your AdWords reports, you’ll see the number of calls generated by each campaign, call duration, and in the near future, caller area code. You’ll still only pay for clicks on your ads, but we intend to charge for call metrics in the future.”

While it’s free for the time being, the pundits speculate that the service will eventually morph into a pay-per-call platform. Additionally, the only data points Google Call Metrics provide are somewhat limited and include only time of call, call duration and area codes in the aggregate.

Marketers who require a more sophisticated solution to understanding which marketing sources drive phone calls often turn to call tracking providers such as Mongoose Metrics. The Mongoose suite of products provides visibility into session-level, granular data about caller behavior from click to close.

Here’s how Google Adwords Call Metrics stacks up next to Mongoose Metrics Call Tracking:

For more information about how call tracking can improve ROI by up to 30 percent, schedule a meeting, download one of our many whitepapers or call 877.495.4440.

Follow us on Twitter @mongoosemetrics for the freshest links to the best sources of information about PPC, Web Analytics, Call Tracking, SEO, Social Media, Local & Mobile Search.

Mongoose MetricsConversion & Call Tracking Blog