Posts Tagged: phone call tracking

The Forgotten PPC Metric: Phone Call Conversions

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is used to drive traffic to your brand’s website, and is typically measured using online analytics. However, the most successful PPC campaigns are those that can capture and associate any form of lead conversion with a specific campaign, ad, keyword and landing page.

The missing, and often forgotten, piece to this lead conversion picture is the phone call. To effectively capture these offline conversions and tie them to your PPC campaigns, you need to integrate a call tracking solution.

PPC 360° — Tracking a Complete View

When you combine phone calls with online form completions, you can gather valuable insight into campaign performance that will help you evaluate your PPC campaign and maximize returns. Specifically, you can use this information to evolve:

Keyword Selection: With call tracking and web analytics, you can identify the keywords that are driving lead conversions. Use this information to understand what terms drive the highest quality traffic, and then build out your campaigns using these terms, and direct synonyms, to increase conversions. At the same time, cut back on, or eliminate, the keywords that don’t result in conversions.
Bid Management: With the top lead-producing keywords identified, you can better manage how much you are willing to bid on each for top placement. If you know a keyword drives conversions, you can use ROI to justify spending more money per click. At the same time, you can reduce spend on keywords that are not driving adequate lead volume.
PPC Advertising Budget: With call tracking and web analytics showing you all lead conversions, you can make informed decisions on whether you are receiving an acceptable ROI on your PPC investment, and compare its return to other marketing and advertising initiatives. Depending on PPC rate of return, you may consider allocating more budget toward your campaign, or conversely, shift budgets away from PPC advertising to other, more effective marketing campaigns.
Landing Page Design and CTAs: The most successful PPC campaigns have a clear call to action, for example make a purchase, fill out a lead form, download content or call for additional information. Evaluate landing page design and CTA performance based on both online and offline conversion data. What may look like the best CTA in online analytics may not prove the best when you account for phone calls. Understand how your audiences prefer to communicate and what resonates with them, and then prompt them to take action based on their preferences as to improve conversion rates.

How to Integrate Call Tracking into Your PPC Campaign

The reason for integrating call tracking into PPC advertising is clear: it provides a full picture of campaign performance, helping you make informed investments.

Here are four quick steps to get started with call tracking for PPC.

First, work with a call tracking provider for initial setup.
Add call tracking numbers throughout your website, either by manually placing them on individual landing pages or integrating a call tracking Javascript snippet into your website’s HTML code.
Next, integrate call tracking into your PPC advertisements. Google offers a phone number ad extension, or you can also integrate numbers into ad copy or within the imagery of display ads.
Finally, assess complete ad performance and conversion rate by feeding your call-tracking data into web analytics and PPC platforms. Depending on the call tracking solution used, this data can be automatically piped into your PPC account dashboard.

With call tracking integrated into your PPC campaigns, you can have a complete view of conversions, even when a lead picks up the phone to call. Analyze your campaigns; test new keywords, ads, bid strategies and landing pages; then evolve based on conversion data, and start the process again.

What successes have you had using call tracking for PPC?

Analytics / Call Tracking / CRM / Integration / Offline Advertising / PPC / Sales — No Comments
14
Sep 11

Less is More…Funneling the Right Sales Leads for Higher Conversions

Poll your sales team: Would they rather receive three well-qualified leads from marketing next month, or 15 cold ones? Well-qualified leads will win every time.

Even with sales cycles lengthening and becoming more complex, a 2011 SiriusDecisions survey of B2B sales and marketing leaders found that top-performing companies are using business intelligence technology to approach the sales pipeline with an emphasis on identifying higher-quality leads.

The concept may seem counter-intuitive, but less, better-qualified leads are actually easier for sales to work with:

Sales representatives have busy calendars. Filling them up with calls or meetings with non-qualified leads is a waste of time and resources.
Cold calls or reps that come off as too aggressive too early in the buying cycle may turn off potential customers that are not ready to make a purchase decision, ruining chances of future sales.
When marketing is able to hand a lead over to sales with a complete history already established, it leads to a shorter process for the rep, and shorter sales cycle overall.
Sales can tailor messaging to leads that have qualified themselves, making each interaction more effective.

“Too many raw, unqualified leads can create a clogged marketing and sales process and an unhealthy sales funnel.” —Why Your Sales Force Needs Fewer Leads, PointClear, LLC

Today’s marketing and sales business intelligence technologies—including web analytics, call tracking, and CRM systems—enable marketers and sales reps to work together to maintain a tighter pipeline-to-quota ratio and grow sales.

Complete Analytics Qualifies Marketing Leads

Spending on online advertising specifically aimed to generate leads has grown by $12 billion in the last four years. Once you have a lead’s attention, tracking activity and scoring leads is made simple through comprehensive analytics that measure online and offline activity.

Web Analytics

Consumer buying habits indicate that overall, 43 percent of consumers go online to research before buying. This number increases for technology purchases, as well as other complex purchases.

Track online activity to target your most qualified leads. If marketing can remove the qualification process from sales’ plate by placing leads into a nurturing program, assessing actions, and profiling the most qualified prospects, it can confidentially deliver a narrow list of well-qualified leads (and their lead history) to sales.

Call Tracking

Web analytics are great, but all is lost when a lead picks up the phone. When a lead calls, he or she is taking a proactive step in the decision-making process, and you should have the technologies in place to track and report on these prospects.

Integrating call tracking with marketing activities through one-to-one and Javascript integration, you can monitor offline lead activity, including how leads found you and what prompted them to call. Analyze these reports to score and qualify leads that reach out to you by phone.

CRM Systems

What tools are best used to house lead history, and combine efforts of marketing and sales? A sound customer relationship management (CRM) system is a necessity to make the process between marketing and sales flow effectively.

Track lead timelines, history, actions, touchpoints, demographic and firmographic information, who’s responsible for the lead (sales vs. marketing), and more with CRM software. You can also use a CRM to evaluate and prioritze all leads in your database.

Good Lead, Bad Lead.

Another challenge for marketers is defining a qualified lead. Once you have compiled your lead history, what should you look for, and what information should you provide to sales?

What determines a qualified lead will change for specific business cases, but here’s a list to get started. Consider these parameters when building lead forms so you have the information needed to evaluate:

Budget
Decision-making timeline
How the lead found you
Lead history, interactions and touch points

Have you found success with a “less-is-more” approach to sales leads? Share your experiences in the comments below.

Features, Tips, & Announcements — No Comments
31
Aug 11

Call Tracking 101: How to Integrate Call Tracking Into Your Marketing Campaigns

Marketing in the past relied heavily on the “spray and pray” mentality—if you could get your message in front of enough people, at least a few would be compelled to take action. With limiting reporting available to directly tie tactics to results, many campaigns were simply shots in the dark.

Today’s marketer has the technology available to report on prospect interactions and conversions from specific marketing activities, and use that data to evolve campaigns based on results.

Most marketers now use web analytics to understand how leads interact with their brand online, but what happens when a prospect picks up the phone?

With more users browsing the web via mobile devices, companies are likely to receive more offline customer calls and conversions. And let’s not forget that some people simply prefer to call, especially when dealing with local businesses. With a call tracking solution, you can find out what marketing activities prompt these offline conversions.

Two Ways to Implement Call Tracking

There are two simple ways to incorporate call tracking into your marketing analytics: one-to-one and Javascript integrations. Following are details about both methods, including how they work and best practices.

One-to-One Integration

The Basics: The idea behind one-to-one integration is to assign unique call tracking numbers to specific marketing tactics, campaigns or activities. For example, if you are running a series of print advertisements across several publications, assign a unique call tracking number to each publication, and then integrate the number into the corresponding ads. As a call comes in, you’ll know which publication prompted the call.

How It Works: It’s automated. As calls are logged, your call tracking solution will record the conversion, associate it with the proper marketing activity, and keep this data on file for your team to review and analyze.

When To Use It: One-to-one integration is ideal for marketing activities that take place off your website, often more traditional tactics. Think of campaigns that engage leads when they are offline, such as:

Billboard and Print Advertisements
Television and Radio Advertisements or Placements
Mobile Messaging Campaigns
Promotional Fliers
Guerrilla Marketing Tactics

Javascript Integration

The Basics: A Javascript snippet, provided by your call tracking platform, is code integrated throughout your website, similar to analytics tracking code, that provides detailed reporting of visitor activity that leads to a phone call.

How It Works: This Javascript snippet captures site visitor information and displays a unique phone number to each visitor on your website. The number follows the user from page to page via a cookie that is automatically installed on his or her browser. Even if a visitor leaves the website, as long as the cookie hasn’t been cleared, he or she will see their same phone number upon return.

When a user picks up the phone to call, the call tracking solution associates the call with the corresponding visitor information gathered online. This information—including source, landing page and last page visited—is recorded and stored for your team to review and analyze.

When To Use It: Javascript integration is ideal for campaigns that drive audiences to your website, and those that require higher level of tracking detail. Because the code captures each lead’s historical data, and doesn’t have to be tied to specific campaigns, reports can give insight into the overall effectiveness of your marketing activities as a whole. Use Javascript integration to measure the results of the following marketing tactics, and more:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Online Advertisements
Link-Building Campaigns

Using data and reports from call tracking, you can determine which marketing campaigns, activities and messages resonate with your audience and generate more leads. When tied to a CRM, you can also determine the sales value and ROI of your efforts. With this information, you can make smarter decisions on how to invest your time and budgets.

What questions do you have about call tracking?

Features, Tips, & Announcements — No Comments
17
Aug 11

How Conversion Tracking Can Drive Content Marketing

Content marketing strategies are often based on market trends, business objectives or messaging. However, to help guide content marketing efforts to best meet buyer
needs, marketers should use analytics and conversion metrics to ensure that content is both topically relevant and easy for qualified audiences to find.

With web analytics and call tracking solutions, marketers can collect conversion information and track secondary lead activity generated by content, which can be used to
further optimize efforts and improve ROI.

Develop Content Ideas and Promotion Strategy

Analytics can help marketers identify the topics that drive visitors, and then use this information to develop related content to spur download-driven lead conversions. Following are metrics your marketing team can use to identify content topics, and the best place to publish:

Traffic-Driving Keywords — Review the keywords that drive visitors to your website, and to your competitors’ website. You can do this through your own web analytics, and using tools like alexa.com, which shows high-impact search queries for any website. What products or services are they interested in, and can you develop relevant content about that topic to convert these searchers into leads? Also consider long-tail keyword traffic for common themes or questions that arise
Top Landing and Content Pages — What pages do visitors land on and click through to most often, but have limited conversions? Develop related content to feature on these pages as a way to promote lead conversions.
Traffic Sources — What website traffic sources have historically driven the most leads? Consider partner websites, guest posts, social media, eNewsletters, advertisements and more. Identify your leading sources, and integrate them into your content promotion strategy.

Track Content Marketing Success

Strengthen your content marketing efforts by tracking resulting conversions. Integrate analytics tracking code and call tracking to know what content spurs secondary action from your leads.

Within Actual Content — Offer users multiple ways to convert throughout content pieces. For example, include a campaign-specific phone number in eBooks and white papers that you associate with the asset in your call-tracking platform. For audiences that prefer to contact you online, or may not be ready to buy, include links to web contact forms and subscription pages for your blog or eNewsletter
Throughout Your Website — Make sure to capture as much visitor-activity information as possible. With call tracking, you can install a Javascript snippet that tracks sources of phone calls, enabling you to associate a call from a web visitor that clicked through to your site from a content piece. In addition, use web analytics to track online conversions, as well as their related sources, mediums and campaigns.
Test and Evolve— By strategically developing content for your buyers and properly tracking all conversions, you can continually adjust campaigns, messages and calls to action based on ROI.

If you’re interested in more information about conversion tracking and content marketing, check out the blog post How to Track Content Marketing Lead Conversions.

How has your company used conversion tracking to drive its content marketing efforts?

Analytics / Call Tracking / PPC / Search Marketing — No Comments
12
Jul 11

Determine the “Why” of Conversion Rates with Web Analytics and Call Tracking

Whether you’re investing in a multi-faceted marketing campaign, or you want to evaluate the main calls to action on your website, one of the most important metrics in determining the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is the conversion rate of audiences to leads.

However, looking at the conversion rate alone is not enough information to help you determine how to improve campaigns and increase conversions.

Instead, you must look at the full scope of data available to you through web analytics and call tracking tools. Together, these will help you paint a detailed picture of how your target audiences interact with your marketing efforts, and give you the information you need to better evolve your campaigns.

What Conversion Rates Tell You – Using Web Analytics and Call Tracking

The conversion rate, or frequency at which someone takes a desired action and becomes a lead, gives you the percentage rate of success your calls to action yield.

Utilizing both web analytics and a call tracking solution will help to you track both on- and offline conversions—for example, lead form completions and phone calls—for an accurate representation of marketing-activity effectiveness. This is particularly important when analyzing campaigns across several mediums, such as TV, print and online.

The conversion rate will help you answer questions about what is working: which aspects of your campaign are, and are not, successfully converting audiences into leads. But, it won’t explain why: why individuals respond better to one campaign over another.

It isn’t until you are able to answer “why” that you can make strategic adjustments to your campaigns that increase lead generation and increase ROI.

Answering the “Why” of Conversions with Web Analytics and Call Tracking

Let’s say your PPC campaign yields 10 percent more leads than your TV ad. While that number is useful for identifying one campaign’s effectiveness over another, it doesn’t tell you why this is the case.

To gather this information, you have to dig deeper into website analytics and call tracking data. Below are key metrics to evaluate that can help you identify why and how different elements of your campaign impact conversion rates:

Conversion Source (i.e. PPC ad or offline TV ad) — What sources drove conversions? Use this information to analyze the headlines, messaging, calls to action, or promotions that tend to result in lead activity, and which don’t.
Conversion Web Page — If a marketing effort drove visitors to your website, what was the last page they viewed before completing a lead form or calling? Again, look for headlines, messaging and calls to action that motivate visitors to convert.
Exit Rate / Bounce Rate — What pages are least likely to encourage a visitor’s conversion? Where are visitors leaving your site from, and how do these pages differ from those that generate leads?
Pages/Visit and Pageviews — On average, how many pages does someone view before converting, and what topics are they interested in? If multiple pages exist on the same topic, which of these pages perform best? Is there a way to consolidate information into one highly effective page?

How often do visitors click through your site and then exit, signifying that they couldn’t find what they were looking for? What content can be added to your site that will help prospects find what they need?

Use the Data to Evolve Your Campaigns

Use the information available to you through website analytics and call tracking tools, in conjunction with your conversion rates, to take a holistic view of your marketing performance. Evaluate what elements of your campaigns work, which need to be adjusted and how these pieces work together to yield conversions and sales.

By analyzing this data, you can extract valuable details about what your audiences like and dislike, what information they’re looking for and what messages resonate best. Then, you can create an action plan to better meet these preferences. Use A/B testing to further test your theories before full implementation.

What data do you use to analyze conversions?

Call Tracking / Examples / Integration / Offline Advertising — No Comments
5
Jul 11

3 Ways Call Tracking Moves Leads Through the Funnel

Lead conversion data — such as traffic source, keyword searched, web page visits, conversion type and past interactions — can help marketers understand what channels and activities motivate prospects to take action, and also help sales professionals better prioritize and customize sales pitches.

Platforms like HubSpot and Google Analytics, make it easy to track online conversion data (i.e. contact form completions), but what about when a lead picks up the phone and calls? To capture these offline conversions, marketers need call tracking.

Following are three ways call tracking can help to move leads through the sales funnel.

For more details about how to integrate call tracking with your online marketing and measurement tools, read our recent guest post on Hubspot “3 Ways to Track Offline Lead Conversions with Call Tracking.”

1. Lead Generation

To fill the top of the sales funnel with quality prospects, you need to continuously analyze how leads find you and what they are interested in. Armed with this information, you can evolve campaigns to focus more resources and budgets on those activities proven to generate lead conversions.

Call tracking can support this effort by accurately recording offline conversions (i.e. phone calls) and associating each with a specific marketing initiative.

As a visitor arrives to your website or landing page, source data, such as referring site (i.e. search engine, business directory) and keyword query is captured, and he or she is shown a unique tracking number. As soon as a call is placed to this number, the source information and conversion are logged.

From here, this data can be combined with online conversion data to:

Improve website optimization and content marketing efforts by targeting the keywords that have proven to generate leads — whether they come from online or off.
Enhance PPC campaigns by associating conversions with campaigns, ad groups, ads and keyword bids, and then adjusting ads and budgets based on ROI.
Adjust calls to action and messaging by reviewing what seems to resonate with target audiences, and apply this knowledge to other initiatives.

2. Lead Nurturing

After a person has converted into a lead, your job as a marketer is to activate a nurturing campaign that guides them further down the sales funnel. To do this, you need to share useful resources, product details and/or promotions that keep prospects engaged and interested, and your business top of mind.

Call tracking can enhance lead-nurturing campaigns by tracking offline conversions that take place after a prospect has already converted into a lead. For example:

Content Downloads — Integrate a unique tracking number into eBooks, reports, whitepapers and other content downloads. All calls that come in as a result will be associated with the proper content piece and tracked as a requalified lead.
Online Webinars — Similarly, by including a tracking number in webinar call-to-action slides, you can associate resulting calls with the webinar that prompted them.
Lead Nurturing Campaigns — By including tracking numbers in lead nurturing emails and any corresponding landing pages you can associate calls with these efforts.

Using this data, and similar data pulled from online conversions, you can update your content and lead-nurturing campaigns to include calls to action, headlines, promotions and messaging that have proven to re-engage leads, and identify and update the areas that need work.

3. Sales Conversions

To effectively close leads, your sales professionals need to be able to identify a prospect’s need and customize a sales pitch to prove how your product/service can satisfy it. Conversion data collected during the lead-generation and lead-nurturing phases can help simplify this process.

With call tracking, you can capture useful background information for all offline conversions, including traffic source (i.e. referring site, keyword searched, PPC campaign, drip campaign email, content download), last web page visited prior to calling and caller I.D. In addition, you can record incoming calls so that sales professionals can listen to, and get caught up on, what was previously discussed.

By then feeding this information into a CRM, and combining with online conversion data, you can create a comprehensive lead profile, which sales professionals can use to:

Prioritize follow-up communications.
Learn more about a lead’s needs or topics of interest.
Tailor sales pitches.
Engage the prospect.

Do you use a call tracking? If so, how has it improved your inbound marketing campaign performance?

Call Tracking / Integration / Offline Advertising / Search Marketing — No Comments
22
Jun 11

How to Integrate Call Tracking into A/B Testing

The beautiful thing about today’s tracking and reporting technologies — such as web analytics, call tracking and CRMs — is that marketers can use them to test which campaign aspects are better at converting audiences into leads. One way this is done is through A/B testing.

A/B testing enables you to evaluate how well a control version (“A”) compares in performance to a test version (“B”), which may have a different message, call to action, web page layout, color scheme and/or imagery. This type of testing is often used in ads, direct-mail pieces, email marketing and landing pages.

To accurately track performance, you’ll need to capture and record online and offline conversions for both the control and test versions. This can be done with web analytics for online conversions, and call tracking for offline conversions.

Following are the ways you can integrate call tracking into your A/B tests:

Integrate Call Tracking with A/B Testing

For those A/B tests that take place off your website — such as TV ads, direct mail, email newsletters, etc. — associate and integrate a unique call tracking number into the control version and another into the test version. As calls come into these numbers, the call tracking solution will record the conversions and associate them with each test version.

For website and landing page A/B testing, you can install a Javascript snippet provided by your call tracking vendor into the code of your web pages. When a visitor arrives to your site, the web page test version they landed on will be logged and he or she will be shown a unique tracking number via the Javascript. As a call comes into this number, a conversion will be recorded and associated with the corresponding control or test version of the web page.

Note: It is possible to manually add a unique tracking number to each A/B test page, but if a visitor leaves this page and goes to another on your site, the ability to associate offline conversions with an A/B test version will be lost. By installing the Javascript throughout your site, the tracking number follows them from page to page.

Once you have integrated the call tracking numbers, launch both the “A” and “B” test versions simultaneously and allow them to run until a statistically significant data set is collected.

Monitor and Analyze Your A/B Tests

To determine which version performs better, combine both online and offline conversions of each version to form a complete lead-conversion picture.

If your control “A” converted more, that’s the version with which to move forward. Likewise, if test “B” converted more, make this your updated standard. For an additional layer of data, integrate conversion data into a CRM to associate A/B test versions with sales.

Armed with this information, you can confidently make updates to your campaign based on conversion rate, lead quality and ROI.

For more information about A/B testing, visit the ion interactive blog.

Call Tracking / Integration / Sales — No Comments
8
Jun 11

For Digital Marketers: How To Sell Call Tracking to Clients

If you’re a digital marketing agency or corporate marketing professional, part of the way you demonstrate value to clients and managers is through campaign performance reports, for which you likely rely on tracking and reporting technology, such as web analytics platforms, CRM systems and call tracking solutions.

Of course, often these tools come with an additional fee, which you need to justify to your client or manager. To help you through the call tracking solution sales pitch, we’ve compiled the following tips:

1. Understand Their Motivations

Structure your pitch around how call tracking will improve your ability to achieve the objectives set for your marketing campaign. For example:

• If the person you’re pitching is focused on maximizing ROI, explain that with call tracking, you’ll better understand which marketing initiatives generate leads. That way, you can more effectively allocate resources and budgets toward activities that deliver a higher return on marketing spend.

• If your audience is more sales focused, concentrate your pitch on the fact that with a combination of web analytics, call tracking and CRM, you can accurately tie marketing initiatives to customer conversions. With that info, you can shift resources and budgets towards activities that have proven to drive leads that convert into customers.

2. Clearly Detail How Call Tracking Will Work For Them

You don’t necessarily need to get into the specifics of how call tracking works — although you should be able to answer the question if it arises. Instead, focus on explaining how you plan to implement call tracking into your campaign and how it will improve performance. For example:

• PPC campaigns — Add tracking numbers into PPC ads and integrate into landing pages to identify which PPC campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords drive offline leads. Pairing this data with online conversions will enable you to better allocate budgets and evolve campaigns based on ROI.

• Email Marketing — Integrate tracking numbers into lead nurturing campaign emails and e-newsletters to better understand which specials or promotions motivate people to call.

• Mobile Marketing — Track calls that come in via mobile marketing initiatives — including apps, ads, text messages, QR codes and mobile sites — since these audiences may be more inclined to call than complete an online form.

• Offline Advertisements — Track calls that result from promotional initiatives — such as billboards, print ads and on-site promos.

• Tradeshows — Keep track of phone leads that arise from tradeshow booths to better measure and justify the resource and budget commitment for next year.

3. Explain What They Will Get For Their Money with Call Tracking

In addition to the benefits clients and higher-ups will see in marketing campaign performance, make sure your client or manager knows the features and functionality they will get for the investment, and the benefits. Some examples include:

• Web analytics and CRM integration — Automate data sharing to create a single dashboard with all campaign performance and lead conversion details for real-time review and analysis.

• Last web page visited — Understand what a lead was reading or watching right before they called as a way to improve follow-up sales communications.

• Call recording — Record conversations to learn the types of questions leads are asking ask as a way to guide marketing initiatives, and to help sales professionals better qualify and understand a lead’s interest. These recordings can also serve as one-on-one or group sales training tools.

• Caller ID — Collect useful information, including the call back number and name of the company or person that called.

Additional sales tips:

• Show enthusiasm. Get excited about what you’ll be able to do with call tracking, and let this show through in conversations.

• Keep it simple. Keep your descriptions on par with your audience’s understanding of call tracking. You want to express how call tracking will simplify things, which may be hard to do if your explanations are overly technical.

• Speak to a call tracking solution representative. Before your pitch, gain insight from a call tracking sales rep on how to sell the solution and its specific benefits to your client or organization.

• Encourage a trial. If nothing else, try to get your client or manager to agree to try call tracking for a couple months, and then make an educated decision on whether or not the solution is right for the organization long term.

What are some of the ways you got your client or organization to use call tracking?

Analytics / Call Tracking — No Comments
31
May 11

Analyze Online and Offline Conversions with Web Analytics and Call Tracking

Online marketing campaign success is often based on the number of quality leads generated.

As marketers, our ability to generate these leads is contingent on being able to effectively track and monitor campaign performance. Information related to which campaigns are driving conversions, and which aren’t, gives us the insight needed to make informed campaign updates and budget allocation decisions.

Gathering this information starts with making sure the right tools are in place to account for all campaign initiatives that may be generating leads. Effective campaign conversion tracking is reliant on two tracking tools — web analytics and call tracking.

Web Analytics

Website analytic programs, such as Google Analytics and Adobe/Omniture, are fairly commonplace at this point. They offer valuable insight into how visitors found a site, how they interacted with it and whether or not they converted via a web form, content download or online purchase.

When choosing a web analytics program, make sure it tracks traffic sources, pageviews, pages/visit, time on site, bounce rate and — most importantly — online conversions. In addition, it should allow for the integration of call tracking data.

Call Tracking

The one drawback to web analytic programs is they can only track and record online activity. So as soon as someone chooses to take his or her activities offline by making a phone call, all valuable lead information is lost, for example: traffic source, web activity and conversion page.

Fortunately, advancements in call tracking technology over the past three years have created viable options to record offline conversions.

Call tracking solutions document how a visitor arrived to a website, and then feature a dynamic, session-based phone number specific to that traffic source throughout the site. As soon as a visitor calls the number, the conversion and associated web traffic details are logged.

When selecting a call tracking solution program, make sure that it integrates with your web analytics. Through this integration, offline conversion data can be displayed right next to visitors’ website activity and online conversions, providing a complete campaign performance snapshot.

Campaign Conversion Audit

Once the tracking tools are selected, the next step is to audit and catalog the various ways a lead may convert. This involves indexing all the calls to action throughout your site, including phone numbers, lead forms, resource or coupon downloads, and online purchases.

Be as thorough as possible to ensure nothing is overlooked. Any conversion point that isn’t tracked is potentially an opportunity missed or budget wasted.

Set Up Tracking

As soon as all conversion points are listed, make sure each is set up to be tracked by either web analytics or call tracking.

• For web form completions — Make sure that upon completing web forms, visitors are redirected to a “thank you” page. This enables you to easily track form completions by looking at traffic to these pages. In your web analytics program, tag any traffic these pages get as a conversion.

• For resource or coupon downloads — Tag each PDF download link with a snippet of JavaScript that records a virtual pageview every time it’s clicked. In your web analytics program, make sure that every time a virtual pageview occurs, it is logged as a conversion. Reference your analytics program’s help section to find this snippet, and instructions on how to install and track it.

• For phone calls — Look closely at the various ways your campaign may drive traffic to the site. This may include organic search, PPC campaigns, websites featuring banner ads, social media activity and more. In your call analytics program, assign specific call tracking numbers to each traffic source. Once your numbers are assigned, install the provided call tracking code into your site.

Monitor and Review

Once you’ve got your campaigns organized and conversion tracking systems in place, it’s time to monitor campaign performance.

Compare each campaign’s conversions to the budget and time you are allocating to it, and compare them to one another. This should yield a good understanding of marketing return by campaign — which initiatives are providing a good ROI, and which are not.

For under-performing campaigns, test different ways to improve and monitor conversion results until you see the return you want. Using this data, you’ll be able to see which campaign updates are making the biggest difference, keeping things status quo or hurting performance.

Finally, study the data you’ve collected regarding what activities, updates and budget allocations seem to translate into additional conversions, and then apply the lessons learned to other campaigns.

How do you use web analytics and call tracking to optimize your marketing?

Analytics / Call Tracking — No Comments
25
May 11

Improve Lead Nurturing Campaigns with Web Analytics and Call Tracking

Lead nurturing email campaigns enable you to stay foremost in the minds of prospects, while educating them on the benefits of your product or service and motivating them to progress further down the sales funnel.

Additionally, with today’s highly sophisticated web analytics and call tracking tools you can quickly establish a feedback loop to assess success in real-time.

To motivate recipients to take action, you need to clearly express what you want them to do and describe the value they’ll receive in return. An effective way to communicate this is through calls to action.

Following are some tips to incorporate calls to action into your lead nurturing campaign emails and track resulting activity:

Call to Action Options

• Link to online content – Links to eBooks, whitepapers, blogs, brochures, coupons and other online content are effective ways to drive recipients back to your website where they can engage with you further. For peak visibility, add links to banners, feature them within or below content, or incorporate graphic, eye-catching buttons. For example, include a text link below your main email message that says, “Download a 10% Off Coupon Here.”

• Phone number – For those leads who are motivated to contact you but prefer to speak to a person, you should consider including a phone number with a reason to call. For example, “Call today to speak with a sales representative.” These numbers can be featured in your email banner, directly within content, or called out in a right- or left-hand email column.

• Contact form – Web forms offer a convenient way for recipients to request to be contacted, download a valuable piece of content or register for a webinar. Integrate these forms into your email’s main content section or right- or left-hand column and include a compelling message. For example, “Register Today Only.”

Whichever calls to action you choose, make sure to include a compelling message that clearly details which action you want a recipient to take and what they will get for clicking or calling. This message should always answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”

Assessing Email Campaign Performance with Web Analytics and Call Tracking

As with any other marketing initiative, to yield the best return you’ll need to continuously test and evolve your lead nurturing calls to action.

For this reason, it’s important to integrate tracking tools that will enable you to capture and record any resulting web activity, as well as both online and offline conversions.

Web analytics

With most analytics programs, you can add tags to the end of a link so that as soon as someone arrives to your site via that link, your web analytics software automatically associates the visit with a specific lead-nurturing email. For example, Google Analytics offers this URL Builder that can add multiple tags to the end of a URL.

Depending on your tracking needs, you may add the same tag to all your email links, or tag each link individually. Consider individual tags if you want to understand which link formats, locations or messages are most effective at generating clicks.

To record form completions, after someone submits their information via an email form, direct them to a unique thank-you web page. Within your analytics program, associate any visits to this web page as a conversion. Since only individuals who have completed the email form will land on this page, you can accurately track these as conversions.

Call tracking

Call tracking software enables you to associate any phone calls with a specific lead-nurturing campaign. This can be done in two ways:

• Assign and include a unique phone number in your lead nurturing email. Any calls that result will be automatically be associated with the email and reported in your dashboard.

• Integrate the small Javascript snippet (provided by your call tracking vendor) throughout your website. This snippet will automatically show a unique phone number to each website visitor and associate the number with how the visitor arrived on the site, for example via your lead-nurturing email. Any calls that come into this number are then automatically associated with your email and reported in your dashboard.

Remember, it’s important to continuously experiment with the format, messaging and location of your lead nurturing calls to action. Only through this test-and-evolve process can you ensure the greatest results on your campaign.

How do you use lead nurturing calls to action to improve campaign performance?

Mongoose MetricsConversion & Call Tracking Blog