As a rapidly-growing paid media agency, DriftLead relies on innovative tools to enhance their clients' advertising campaigns. They utilize a variety of platforms and technologies to gather critical data, and one tool that has proven indispensable in their arsenal is CallRail.
CallRail’s suite of features has allowed the DriftLead team to better track and analyze phone calls and form submissions. This has enabled them to measure the success of their clients' marketing efforts more accurately and better optimize toward lead quality.
Integrating CallRail to elevate tracking capabilities
DriftLead has always acknowledged the need for tracking end-to-end call and lead performance but was dissatisfied with other solutions. The prior solution they were using took over an hour to configure for each client and did not support any third-party integrations. This created some onboarding headaches and also limited the granularity of insights that they could obtain.
After switching to CallRail, DriftLead has been able to set up call tracking within minutes and gain a comprehensive view of how their ads performed across various platforms. It also goes even further by enabling granular insight into the origin of the lead and visibility on how it performed.
Optimizing conversions through advanced tracking
In their acquisition approach, DriftLead wanted to prioritize first-time callers as a primary conversion event. Because they work with SaaS companies and organizations that have longer buying cycles and receive calls from existing customers, they wanted to focus on generating first-time callers first.
Simultaneously, they identify repeat callers as a secondary conversion event, thereby focusing campaign metrics on lead growth. Customer retention is inevitably a crucial component of lifetime value, NPS, and other metrics that ultimately impact the bottom line. For this reason, they did not want to completely neglect repeat callers but simply prioritize new ones.
This insight allows them to report on the volume of new callers versus repeat and help their clients better understand the behaviors and needs of existing customers versus new.
Boosting call quality with SuperMetrics and Looker Studio
To streamline their data analysis and visualization, DriftLead uses the SuperMetrics CallRail connector, linking CallRail's robust API to their Looker Studio dashboard. This integration gives them the ability to create three distinct buckets to measure the quality of calls based on length: 0-60 seconds, 61-120 seconds, and 121+ seconds.
For their SaaS clients and those with more complex or expensive products, they observed that barely any calls within the 0-60 seconds range resulted in a conversion and conversely, that the calls that lasted over 121 seconds had the highest conversion rates (to the extent of 10x for some clients).
For this reason, their goal was to minimize the volume of calls in the 0-60 second range, (suggesting a lower quality of interaction), while boosting the quantity in the other two, higher-quality buckets. Their dashboard enables them to pinpoint campaigns that appear to perform well on the surface but, after deeper analysis, require budget reallocation to drive higher quality calls.
Improving call-form splits
For nearly all of DriftLead’s lead-gen clients, they have seen that calls consistently convert better than forms, and therefore are more valuable to their clients. By employing the above strategies, they significantly improved their client's conversion event split, moving from a 20% call and 80% form distribution to a remarkable 70% call and 30% form split. Even more compelling, they managed to ensure that 70% of the calls fell into the higher-quality buckets of 61-120 seconds and 121+ seconds.
Conclusion
CallRail is revolutionizing how agencies like DriftLead optimize ad campaigns. Using CallRail to fill the gaps in their marketing attribution reporting, they gained a competitive edge in the market, offering their clients clear, measurable improvements in their campaigns. The result is higher quality interactions, enhanced conversion rates, and a more effective use of advertising budget—proving once again that leveraging the right technology can drive tangible results in the world of digital advertising.
