If You Can Measure It, Then You Can Improve It
Do you have a website and want to start attracting people who are looking for your business and services? Or have you been marketing online for a while now and are excited to take your business to the next level? Regardless of your level of experience, call tracking should be one of the most basic requirements for your business. Fortunately, at Powered by Search, a full service Digital Marketing Agency located in Toronto, Canada, we have the privilege to advise many different businesses about connecting their passions with people who are looking for them. Often times people pick up the phone to reach a business, and call tracking allows us to optimize marketing campaigns for those businesses by measuring their inbound phone call leads.
What’s great about digital marketing is that you can measure any and everything. Our COO, Matthew Hunt is always reinforcing that, “_If you can measure it, then you can improve it_” and the opposite is also true. In this post, we’ll run through why you should be measuring your inbound phone leads, and how.
Tracking your calls makes your business more money
Call tracking for your business is essential, so that you can measure the degree of success or failure of your marketing efforts through the abundance or lack of phone leads coming in. If you can make incremental improvements each week armed with the right information, that call tracking data provides, then that positive cumulative effect over the long term will build and contribute to your success. Should you be using call tracking? Here are some important questions for you to consider:
- Are you seeing the whole picture of your incoming leads: Putting together a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces is not a fun experience. Similarly, web form fills are not enough to see what’s happening in your business. Some people like to call you instead of filling out a web form. Depending on your industry, web form to phone call ratios can be substantial towards either direction. You have to track it in order to find out what it is for your business. We had a situation where our client didn’t want to spend the money on call tracking for the longest time. Then after persistently raising our concerns over the span of almost a year, they finally decided to install call tracking. After a few months, we found out that for each form fill they received, they had an additional three phone calls. So before call tracking, if they had 100 web form fills, they thought that their cost of acquisition per lead was very high. After adding the monthly 300+ phone calls, they understood what their real cost per lead was and were happier with our marketing efforts. We weren’t flying blind anymore.
- Are you missing any opportunities with your current marketing efforts?: Maybe your staff are saying that the phones have simply not been ringing. We had a situation where on of our franchise clients had 35 locations across Canada, and their franchisees were saying they weren’t getting phone leads. After we installed call tracking for a few months, we immediately found out that over 38% of the calls were not being answered during regular business hours each week! They were missing 240+ phone calls each month. Is that a worthwhile piece of business intelligence?
- How can you improve your customer experience and sales?: Sales and customer retention are the lifeblood of any business. With call tracking, every call can be recorded for ‘quality assurance’. You can check the call quality of your phone staff, sales team, and even call center. Send your team the call recordings in order to provide constructive feedback, training, or praise. As a psychological effect, you’ll probably have more happy customers getting proper service if your employees know that every call was being recorded. Imagine if your team’s phone closing ratio is 10%, and they got weekly training and feedback based on their recorded calls. If you could see an increase up to 12-15%, then that would do wonders to your bottom line.
- Need help with the right staffing schedules for your business?: You can run all kinds of interesting reports in your call tracking backend dashboard like a ‘Day and Time’ report. These reports allow you to account for any date range, how many calls are coming in, what time in the day they come in, and which days in the week they occur. For example, you may be getting high volume of calls between 12pm – 2pm. Then, lunch time for your employees will either be at later time or they need to be staggered between phone people. Do you get high volume of calls from 5pm – 7pm, but you close at 5pm? If you want to maximize your profits, then you may need to rethink your business hours or have an extra after hours representative on the phone. You get high volume of calls on the weekends but are not open? Well, you decide what is best for your customers and business.
Is Your Paid Advertising Working?
For our Google Ads ( formerly AdWords) clients, we not only have call tracking on every page of their website including landing pages, we also set up local and toll-free static numbers that we use to track call extensions. Call extensions in Google Ads allow prospects to call you directly from your ad without even going to your site! Ever click a phone icon on an ad on your mobile smart phone? How cool is that? We also put static call tracking numbers on our banner ad designs, so that we can track the calls coming from our remarketing or display ad campaigns when people are surfing the web on their favorite celebrity, sports, business or news websites that have relationship with Google Ads. For our Social Media Marketing Clients, we put static call tracking numbers in our native advertising content to track conversions. You know… the ads that are in your news feed that are blended with your friends’ posts. Do you have a landing page which tests a special offer or is meant to increase conversions from your Pay Per Click prospects? Track all of your calls. There are so many reasons to love call tracking!
- What is the quality of your paid advertising phone leads?: So after getting the correct lead counts, you can spot check the recorded calls and determine the quality of the leads. Are these really potential customers? You may find that you get tons of non lead inferring questions, those calls may be people looking for your brand name that are already customers, and called through an ad when they were looking for your contact info on Google. You can then adjust your PPC campaigns that are bidding on your brand names by removing the phone extensions from those ads to reduce these non-leads.
- Is your email marketing being fully maximized?: You can track calls from your email automation messages and not just clicks to your landing pages.
- Is your offline advertising working?: Call tracking numbers can be used specifically for offline marketing campaigns such as billboards, magazine, radio, TV, non-YouTube video ads, etc.
- Do you have a specific offering on your site that you want to track?: We have many cosmetology college clients who have two numbers on their sites, one for their ‘Admissions’ inquiries and one for their ‘Student Salons’ inquiries, where their students practice on people who want discounted hair, colour or spa services. In these cases, they only want to track the ‘Admissions’ calls because potential students enrolling in their beauty courses are more lucrative than calls for being discounted spa service customers.
Now That You’ve Started, Answer The Right Questions
After you understand ‘why’ you need call tracking and have implemented it in your business, there are new questions to answer related to the ‘where’ and ‘how’ of your callers. The quality of your questions will lead you to more purpose and give you greater results.
- What keywords did your visitors type into the search engines to get to your site, then call you? Simply run a ‘Keyword’ report. Pick any date range and voila! This report will tell you what initial keywords your calls came from. This will inform your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.
- What channel is driving your phone call leads? You can run a useful report like a ‘Source’ report. Pick any date range and this report will tell you if a call on your site came from Social Media, PPC, Organic Search, Direct or Not Provided.
- Where are your callers coming as far as their locations? You can run a report and look at the mix of area codes the callers’ phone number are from. Are you a primarily local business? Look at if the calls are from all the local area codes or not.
- Do you have more than one location? We had a situation where a client was a career college business with 50 locations across Canada, so we advised them to get toll-free call tracking on every page of their site that forwards to their call center, and for their 50 campus location pages, to get tracking numbers with local area codes. Here is more detailed call tracking advice for franchises and multi-location businesses.
Do you want more control over your Local SEO efforts?
Local SEO requires consistency in your business name, business address and business phone number, often referred to as NAP consistency. If you are starting your business from scratch, then you can choose to have a permanent static local area code call tracking number. Do not do this if you are not a brand new location or business. This way, your number is consistent throughout the life of your business. Changing phone numbers? No problem, just change the ‘ring to’ number that your call tracking forwards to. This is great for franchises also when a franchisee exits your program and is replaced by another. Simply change the ‘ring to’ number.
What if you sell your business in the future and can’t transfer your business phone number for whatever reason? This is not a challenge with call tracking, just change the ‘ring to’ number. For Local SEO, if you have a change in your NAP, then you will lose local rankings that you invested in creating, and basically have to start over again.
Are you taking advantage of call tracking?
In the ever changing digital landscape, you need to have the ability to clearly see how many total leads are coming in, where they’re coming from, when they call & how they’re coming in. If you can track all of the engagement people have with your brand, then you can discover which parts of your marketing needs more attention. You can’t ignore call tracking as a basic requirement to correctly assess the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Please leave your comments below if you have any questions, feedback or want to share your experience with call tracking.
Dat To, is an Account Director for the SME Division at Powered by Search, a Full Service Digital Marketing Agency specializing in SEO, PPC, SMM, & CRO.
