Are Your Online Campaigns Flopping? Turn Them Into Winners.

As a digital marketer, have you been finding that your online campaigns for the myriad of clients you serve are flopping? Don’t be so certain. You can actually turn them into winning formulas by introducing call tracking. What IS call tracking, you ask, and why should you care? Most businesses and marketers we’ve worked with measure their success based on a series of digital analytics such as organic visits, page views and, of course, goal conversions. Now, we’ve never believed this is the wrong thing to do – quite the opposite, in fact – but you might be seriously underestimating your leads and inquiries.

Let’s begin by asking this question: Would you agree that it’s safe to say people look to the internet to help make decisions? Even so, not all business is scored online; indeed, many people still pick up the phone and this usually is a major source of new leads. Until recently, it has been nearly impossible to determine where telephone inquiries originated from, resulting in, as you may very well know, a nightmare for anyone trying to discern how effective their marketing has been.

Welcome to Call Tracking

The latest call tracking software can inform you which marketing efforts are successfully generating calls and which are falling behind. What’s more, call tracking is also an ideal companion for your SEO efforts, so at this point you should be asking yourself, “Why is it I never considered tracking calls when all my competitors have?”

The concept that defines call tracking is actually quite simple: You create and track a different telephone number for each of your campaigns, and then the call tracking software takes over to record the number of calls you receive, thus yielding a genuine overview of how your campaigns are working.

Call tracking data enables you determine which campaigns are generating conversions – i.e. prospects that have become paying customers – and can even display the time and date of the call. More importantly, you can track the Return on Investment (ROI) of each marketing channel. Further, call tracking enables you to monitor which areas of marketing – digital and offline – are performing solidly and which need improvement.

As you think about ways to reverse the flopping of your online campaigns, consider these areas that call tracking works well for:

• Organic Search Engine Traffic – Determine which landing pages are generating calls to your clients’ businesses.
• Pay-Per-Click Campaigns – See which keywords are working best.
• Digital Advertising Campaigns – It is possible to actually see which display advertisements perform best by using a different telephone number on each ad you run.

For most businesses, the goal conversion rate is generated by channels such as Google Analytics but this isn’t a fair comparison if conversions are originating from telephone inquiries. Call tracking enables you to fill in the gaps of your lead generation efforts, and if you know exactly where conversions originated you can accurately measure clients’ ROI.