PPC and Call Tracking : How can you increase results and lower costs?

When it comes to PPC marketing, knowing what is and isn’t driving sales for your business is vital.

Inbound sales calls play a huge role for many businesses, with calls often being used for big purchases where a reassuring discussion with an expert is needed. It’s a high intention touchpoint, but if you’re not tracking what’s leading to those calls, how can you have any certainty over what’s leading those calls?

You could be spending huge sums on your PPC campaign that are driving clicks, but not calls.

Enter Call Tracking.

We recently looked at the question of ‘What is call tracking?’, but today we’re going to look at some of the benefits it brings to your PPC campaigns.

We’re going to cover:

• Keywords that convert
• Which Of Your Ads Are Generating Calls
• Appear Local With Local Numbers
• Improve Your Sales Tactics
• Measure The Quality Of Your Calls
• Track Sales To The Original Source
• Integrate With Your CRM

“Knowing the keywords, channels, and activities which lead to calls means you can be far smarter about how you spend your marketing budgets. Invest in what’s making financial sense and reconsider things that don’t produce optimal results.”

Chris Sedlmayr | Product Director, Infinity

Keywords that convert

Successful PPC management is built on increasing spend for keywords which are performing well and reducing spend for those that aren’t.

But what happens if you have keywords driving telephone sales to your business but aren’t being measured? You may risk reducing your spend on those keywords as it may look as though they are not producing any sales.

This then leads to lost revenue because those keywords aren’t going to be receiving as many clicks. Unfortunately, because they weren’t being measured in the first place, it will usually be extremely difficult to find out why there is a fluctuation in revenue.

Call tracking will deliver insight on what keywords were clicked for each visit, this is vital as the ones clicked at the beginning of the buyer journey may be different from how people came to your website again later.

Any PPC Management Company worth their salt should be doing this from day one. However, if you’re managing campaigns yourself, then there’s no time like the present to get started.

Brands really benefit from being able to access this data. For instance, in their global expansion Scott Dunn have been able to increase their digitally tracked US bookings by a huge 53% by implementing call tracking and adjusting their PPC strategy accordingly.

Which of your ads are generating calls?

Campaign effectiveness is a cornerstone of marketing that exceeds expectations. When it comes to your PPC ads, it’s highly likely that you’ll have multiple ads running in each ad group to try and find out which version is the most effective.

Call tracking allows you to measure the calls that are made to your business at the ad-level. This is much more accurate than simply optimising your campaigns based on website conversions alone.

Instead we can see the whole picture of how calls are being made to your business, the revenue generated and giving you the ability to optimise campaigns much more accurately.

Improve Your Sales Tactics

One of the great features of call tracking is the ability to catalogue calls by keyword or outcome, find them easily, and listen back to them after they have been made.

By finding out what your customers top pre-sales questions are, you’ll be able to find new content to include on your landing pages to increase conversions.

“In the past, finding and cataloguing such details was a long and arduous task that cost countless hours. Linking this data meaningfully to CRMs and customer journeys was a major hassle too. Conversation analytics can give you these details, and surface other similar conversations in seconds. This unlocks a plethora of exciting use cases for a wide mix of industries and departments.”

Chris Sedlmayr - Product Director, Infinity

Measure The Quality Of Your Calls

If you’re using PPC to generate leads for your business, a huge factor in allocating your budget effectively is making sure that you are driving quality leads to your sales team and not just tyre-kickers.

Call tracking platforms with Conversation Analytics allow you to measure the quality of phone leads depending on the keywords used on the call, and how much you want to have these types of callers. You can customise these keywords and rate how much you value them, this can give both a positive and a negative value. For example, you may want more calls mentioning luxury products, and fewer asking about “cheap deals”.

Track Sales To The Original Keyword

Understanding the full user journey helps you to optimise the areas that will lead to the biggest impact for your business. Call tracking gives you the ability to analyse the user interaction with your website from when they arrive on their first visit to when they become a customer.

Using this data, we can prioritise budget towards the keywords that are influencing sales the most. This includes ones that start the journey in the research phase and lead to a sale later on, but often don’t convert right away.

Appear Local With Local Numbers

Let’s say you have locations in London, Manchester, New York, and Sydney. You have invested significantly in setting up a physical presence in these areas and have a PPC strategy to attract nearby people, but still want to dynamically track the journeys that led to calls at those locations. The best call tracking providers are able to give you local numbers for each of these areas.

It is still possible to use the 0800 and 0845 telephone numbers that cover the whole of the United Kingdom, but using a local number will maintain trust in the caller’s mind, who may have qualms about calling an area code that doesn’t correspond with the location you have listed.

Here at Conversion Hut, we’ve seen huge spikes in conversion rates using numbers that are local to the geographic location of the user.

Integrate With Your CRM

If you use a CRM platform, call tracking platforms like Infinity will give you the ability to link a caller’s journey to a customer profile when sales calls are made to your business.

This will allow your sales team to see the search terms that they used before becoming a lead as well as the various touchpoints that they have had.

This will give your sales team the ability to know what to focus on once they make contact with the prospect, so they can get to the point quicker, avoid wasting time with irrelevant questions, and becoming more efficient in closing sales.

More Than Just PPC

Hopefully by now you have seen a handful of the benefits that call tracking brings to your PPC strategy. But understand that call tracking for marketers isn’t just about making the most of your paid search, but also about analysing your user journey so that you can optimise your marketing campaigns more effectively.

Start a conversation with us to find out more.

*This was produced in conjunction with Conversion Hut. *