Friday, May 11, 2012
By Ryann T, Follow me on Google+
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising has changed the way businesses drive traffic to their website. In addition to generating web traffic to a site, PPC also offers a number of tools to measure online analytics. PPC becomes most optimized when a lead conversion can be associated with a specific campaign, ad, keyword, and landing page. While Adwords and other PPC channels offer some very valuable tools to measure campaign efficacy, often what is most forgotten, is the most integral portion of the lead conversion process—the phone call. To capture offline conversions and tie them to a PPC campaign, PPC call tracking solutions are needed. Combining offline lead conversions with call tracking allows businesses can glean valuable insights into campaign performance and maximize returns. The insights gathered from call tracking allows a businesses to make decisions that pertain to :
- Keyword Selection: The analytics gathered from call tracking and web analytics allows businesses to identify the keywords that are driving inbound sales calls and lead conversions. This information is integral to understanding what terms generate the highest quality of traffic. Using these terms and direct synonyms, while at the same time cutting back or eliminating, that don’t result in conversions, will lead to higher ROI on PPC campaigns.
- Bid Management: Knowing which keywords drive lead conversions, businesses can better manage how they bid on each keyword for top placement. Having information on top lead producing keywords, you can use ROI to justify spending more money per click. At the same time, you can reduce the amount spent on keywords that are not driving adequate lead volume.
- PPC Advertising Budget: Call tracking and web analytics allow provide an immense amount of data to make informed decisions on whether you are receiving an acceptable ROI in your PPC campaigns, and compare it to other marketing initiatives.
- Landing Page Design and Call to Actions: Successful PPC campaigns have a clear call to action. Call tracking can supplement web analytics by measuring offline conversion data. What may look like the best call to action in online analytics may not prove the best when you account for phone calls. Understanding how the user prefers to communicates and what resonates with them, allows a business to make a more optimal call to action that increases conversion rates.
- Work with a call tracking provider like CallFire to setup your call tracking numbers.
- Add call tracking numbers throughout your website, either by manually placing them on individual pages or by dynamically serving a call tracking local or toll free number for each referral source. If a user was referred by to a site through an Adwords campaigns, they should be served with a different phone number than someone referred with traditional advertising mediums. In order to dynamically serve call tracking pages, a snippet of Javascript would have to be inserted into the website’s HTML to provide different call tracking numbers based on the referral site.
- Include call tracking into paid advertisements. Google allows a phone number to be integrated into their Adwords campaigns. In addition, it is prudent to integrate numbers into ad copy or within the imagery of display ads.
- Finally, assess complete and performance and conversion rate by feeding your call-tracking data into web analytics and PPC platforms. Depending on the call tracking solution used, this data can be automatically inserted into your PPC account dashboard.