Over the past couple of years, more and more people have begun using the social media site Twitter for obtaining information and connecting with others. In fact, news programs have even started to use people’s comments, or “tweets,” as sources for the latest stories. But perhaps what is most interesting to see is how Twitter has affected the ways of business around the world. For although it is mostly celebrities and sports figures that are grabbing headlines with tweets about their activities, many companies have also embraced this unique form of social media to connect with customers – often with great results.

Mongoose Metrics has quickly established itself as the authority for online marketing information in the Twitterverse. With a following of nearly 3,000 users and a Klout score of 29, it is obvious that many individuals are using the company’s Twitter page as the source for various forms of marketing intelligence. Since Mongoose Metrics joined Twitter in 2008, they have been tweeting incessantly about web analytics, SEO, PPC, B-to-B, Mobile Search, Social Media, and ROI Analysis.Mongoose Metrics’ CEO Bradley Reynolds believes that the company’s success on Twitter shows that the interaction between companies, competitors and customers is continuing to change. He says, “Our immediate success at engaging with potential customers and educating the business-to-business audience at large — not only about our core products and services but about emerging marketing trends — has been a powerful lesson in how social media plays a growing role in business-to-business marketing.”

Overall, Mongoose Metrics has embraced their growing influence on Twitter and sees it as an excellent opportunity for business. As Reynolds says, “If you’re passionate about online marketing, we want to follow you on Twitter.”Tweeting for the Mongoose team @mongoosemetrics are CEO Brad Reynolds @be_reynolds, executive vice president of business development Steve Abbey, marketing and content director Kathleen Colan @consumerati and sales consultant Drew Johnson @drewdjohnson.

Marketers and media buyers who concentrate on getting their messages out with print, broadcast and otherwise traditional methods have long needed a way to quantify the results of their campaigns.  With call tracking numbers placed within advertisements, marketers now have a simple and cost-efficient way to justify their ad spending.  Mongoose Metrics’ recently released white paper, “Call Tracking for Offline Traditional Advertising” explains how call tracking reveals which advertising sources generate the most phone calls.  A recent LinkedIn/Harris Interactive survey confirms: However much online advertising is increasing, offline advertising remains critical for most businesses.  The white paper details how call tracking brings the powerful analytics associated with online advertising to offline advertisers.   It provides a summary of how call tracking works, best practices for success as well as examples of how marketing executives use call tracking to determine which advertisements drive sales and which methods merely bring in browsers.  ”For a nominal fee every month, a company should be able to increase the ROI of their marketing advertising by 20 to 30 percent,” says Bradley Reynolds, chief executive officer for Mongoose Metrics.  He adds, “You’re going to be able to decrease your spending a bit, and spend better on things that convert higher.  It’s a pretty small investment to get a huge return that can transform your business.”Download the white paper, “Call Tracking for Offline Traditional Advertising.”

If you need to learn about call tracking for your online marketing efforts and don’t know where to begin, we’ve got the solution.  Mongoose Metrics’ seven-page white paper “Call Tracking Simplified” breaks down the basics to help marketers understand how call tracking reveals which advertising sources make the phone ring.  If you’re new to SEO or a veteran online marketer, “Call Tracking Simplified” provides a comprehensive overview of call tracking.  You’ll find a summary, background/history, the specifics of how the technology works as well as three case studies detailing how successful businesses use call tracking to understand their complete conversion metrics.  ”If you are only using web analytics to see how visitors interact with your brand, you’re only seeing half the picture.  How can you know what marketing sources — whether they are mobile, PPC, organic, affiliate or traditional offline advertising — are converting if you don’t know what’s driving phone calls?” asks Mongoose Metrics CEO Bradley E. Reynolds.” Call Tracking Simplified” shows the importance of determining which keywords drive calls as well as how to integrate call tracking data with third party web analytics providers, CRM software vendors and bid management purveyors.  Download “Call Tracking Simplified.”

Following last week’s launch of Conversation Conversion Dynamics (CCD), our speech recogntion feature, today we released a seven-page white paper to fully explain how speech recognition helps clients immediately figure out what’s happening on the phone.  “Speech Recognition for Real-Time ROI” gives readers a comprehensive overview — with examples and data — about how speech recognition technology is a game-changer for marketers who need to understand how phone calls are converting and why. 

Mongoose Metrics chief executive officer, Bradley E. Reynolds, says, “Imagine CCD as ‘Google™ for Phone Calls.’  Once the call data is recorded, searching for specific words, phrases and events across a number of variables such as date range, CSR, campaign, etc. to identify actionable improvements becomes as simple as searching for web pages indexed by Google. 

In summary, from the moment a stakeholder begins searching for you with an online search engine, social media network or traditional advertisement to the minute they hang up the phone following a conversation with your customer service representatives, Mongoose Metrics’ CCD solution records every move to reveal patterns of actions and behaviors.

Today we published a seven-page white paper, “Optimizing Mobile Marketing Conversions” to help marketers understand how to quantify conversions from mobile devices.  This is the third and final installment of our Mobile Marketing white paper series which includes “Mobile Marketing for Business - Part I” and “Mobile Marketing Macro Trends - Part 2.”

“Optimizing Mobile Marketing Conversions” answers the questions:

1. How can you analyze and attribute a single person-to-person engagement to a specific mobile marketing effort?
2. How do you create instant feedback loops for this information so that you can react as your market and engagements change?
3. How can you integrate this actionable data into your existing business process?

If you are spending money and time engaging customers via mobile devices, you need to understand how those customers are interacting with you and how you can improve their interactions.

“Combining call tracking data with web analytics data gives marketers one place to view the full conversion picture for both offline and online conversions.   It is imperative with mobile web interactions to view both types of conversions because even the smallest adjustments to content can result in large conversion changes due to mobile’s limited user interface,” says Mongoose Metrics chief executive officer, Bradley E. Reynolds.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions allow organizations to better acquire, manage, serve and extract value from their customers while improving operational efficiency—something that is critical in today’s economy.

By adding call tracking data to your CRM reports you reveal another layer of information about how prospects interact with your brand.

Today we announced another partnership with top CRM provider, Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  “The benefit of adding call tracking data to Microsoft Dynamics CRM lies in the push and pull of dynamic data,” says Bradley Reynolds, chief executive officer of Mongoose Metrics.  He adds, “It’s a smooth-running, two-way street with a data stream of phone calls and Microsoft Dynamics CRM data constantly updating each other.”

For more information about how call tracking data works with a variety of CRM packages, download our white paper “Call Tracking CRM Integration.”

Thanks to prolific blogger Joe “Giuseppe” Zuccaro, aka The Marketing Consigliere (www.marketing-consigliere.com) for educating his readers about the power of call tracking.  His entertaining take — complete with an adorable picture of a mongoose wearing headphones — simply explains how and why marketers are using call tracking with CRM vendors such as SalesForce CRM.  Click here for the story, “Tracking Phone Conversion Like a Mongoose.”

Companies who do business in Canada now can connect with customers more closely.  Today Mongoose Metrics announced the release of local phone numbers for Canada’s top seven metropolitan markets including Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg.  Canadian marketers now have never-before-available options to place local phone numbers on their websites and demonstrate their commitment to the local communities where they do business.  Mongoose Metrics’ pool of local Canadian numbers enables businesses which depend on geographically-oriented phone calls to capture important web-to-phone conversion data with a local flavor.  “We believe in delivering products that our customers ask for,” says Bradley Reynolds, chief executive officer for Mongoose Metrics.  He adds, “And with the addition of local numbers for Canada, we’ve demonstrated our dedication to developing solutions which make sense for our clients.”

Today I want to touch on the URL postback feature and the benefits it offers to our customers.

The URL postback feature is a standard feature in both AccuTrack 1:1 and AccuTrack Session products. Our full integration with existing web analyticss means that there is no additional cost associated with exporting this to your analytics. If you are looking at how to correctly setup this feature, please visit the integration guide - Phone Call Tracking with Google Analytics.

This guide will show you how to correctly set up your Mongoose Metrics account to send tracking data to Google Analytics.

However, in this post I do not want to get too technical and would rather focus on how the URL postback feature works.

How it works:

Whenever a phone call is made on one of your tracking numbers, information about that call is stored on our system. If you are using the URL postback feature, information is passed to Google Anayltics whenever our server visits a designated webpage. This visit is then represented as a phone call in your reports and carries with it details about the call. This information could be length of phone call, phone number, caller location, keyword, etc.

Example:

A visitor types into a search engine “Red Cars” and clicks on your Google Adwords PPC ad. While on your website they decide to give your company a call for more information. After the phone call is made, our system will tie back the visitor session to the original call. Then our server makes a visit to a designated webpage of your choice with the information about the phone call tagged in the URL string. When you view your Google Analytics report you will see this call under the campaign section. From there you can to drill down and see that the caller typed in “Red Cars” to find your website.

How it can help you:

URL postback saves by posting phone call tracking reports  alongside the rest of your online data. This allows you quickly compare the phone call tracking to web data without the need to access two different systems.

SEO and SEM firms have found the URL postback feature helpful because it frees them from having to extract reports from our interface. Instead, clients can easily see their call data in Google Anayltics.

The URL postback feature is a great way to save your company’s valuable time. If you have any more questions, please feel free to give us a call.

 Mongoose Metrics’ AccuTrack Session product allows customers to view what web site the caller visited before he or she called into the client.  AccuTrack Session’s Last URL product feature is the key to this service. Marketers can literally see what lead customers to their site with this service. By tracking the last URL, marketers can gain understandings around their website conversion points or failures.

The Last URL  feature is accomplished through our AccuTrack Session keyword level phone call tracking product.  During AccuTrack Session setup, customers place a javascript code snippet on their campaign web pages. This allows Mongoose Metrics to chronicle each site visitor’s page visit.  We can then correlate the site visit to a phone call.  The correlated data will include the last URL the site visitor viewed just prior to placing the call.

We’re excited about the Last URL feature because we understand how online marketers positively develop with key insights and actionable metrics.

Jeff Tirey is Co-Founder of Mongoose Metrics and can be found @TireyTv