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We’ve all heard the famous line “I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half?”
Well, those days are clearly over now. With online marketing everything can be measured, and why some businesses still don’t take advantage of this, continues to shock me on a daily basis.
Off course, advanced attribution marketing models with many offline and online channels that merge into one big buying funnel can increase the awareness and amount of direct sales for big advertisers, but the majority of businesses in America do not work with advanced attribution models.
99.7% of all businesses in the US are small to medium sized business owners, who often try and seek various media channels in hope of success, and are often influenced and misled by speedy and persuasive sales personnel. That’s why tracking all your advertising is crucial in order to be cost effective.
Keyword Level Call Tracking Really Matters
At White Shark Media we managed AdWords accounts for 800 clients in 2011, and experienced many different expectations from our clients on what a successful Pay Per Click campaign really is.
Some clients wanted a high Ad position on selected keywords, a lower CPC, to drive much more traffic to their site, and of course focus on online conversions. But what about offline conversions and Quality Leads? What about phone calls that convert into sales?
The truth is that most consumers and B2B shoppers prefer to call and ask for additional info before purchasing. In fact, calls convert up to 5 times the rate of clicks/online forms and are the most common way for consumers to connect with businesses. Why is that? People like personal interaction and the feeling that they are dealing with a real person.
At White Shark Media we include Keyword Level Call Tracking on all Clients campaigns as a standard. Don’t get me wrong, we love to measure and analyze performance of all possible metrics in AdWords or Microsoft adCenter, but we don’t want to waste our clients’ money and solely focus on clicks, impressions, quality score and CTR.
These are all very important, but what really matters for John’s Plumber or Sam’s Moving Company are leads. Quality Leads!
Get Customer Behavior Insight with Keyword Level Call Tracking 
Our experience with Keyword Level Call Tracking resulted in a significant increase in ROI for our clients. In certain cases, using Keyword Level Call Tracking increased ROI up to 43%.
With Keyword Level Call Tracking we achieve a better understanding of the actual campaign performance by identifying what keyword actually converted into calls.
Being able to listen to recordings of the calls, gives us a better understanding of the quality of the leads, and also indicates how the searchers interact with our ad copy, landing pages, and how they really understand our marketing message. Not every call is created equal. Far from it!
After monitoring all Call Activity, we optimize the campaign considering all this vital information. We also take into account the location of the call. Are we converting better in certain cities, states or local areas?
We can target our message more directly to selected areas and its audience because of the Geographical Tracking capabilities that come along with Call Tracking.
Tracking Call Metrics on Mobile Campaigns
And don’t even get me started on the importance of Keyword Level Call Tracking on Mobile targeted campaigns. They have the highest conversion rates of all campaigns. Urgency and Proximity are the key drivers of these calls. That’s why advanced Call Analytics should definitely be included on every single Mobile campaign.
But that’s a different story I would like to share on another occasion. For now, I encourage all you local business owners to stop wasting half of your marketing budget and start measuring call activity as a key aspect of your business.
Have you had any success implementing Keyword Level Call Tracking to your Pay Per Click campaigns? Please feel free to share your experiences with us.
