In the modern and competitive world of business, not only does every tactic count but knowing the effectiveness of each tactic we employ is of the utmost importance. When we invest time and money into one particular marketing avenue, we want to be sure we’re getting a good ROI on those investments.
If you sell products online, you want to use different channels and platforms and to be able to track all relevant metrics. To do so, you first need to understand certain concepts and methods of tracking.
For example, what does inbound calls mean? These can come from a variety of sources and be a major source of sales and conversions. We also want to know how to optimize eCommerce conversion funnels to drive sales.
One popular form of marketing/advertising is PPC (pay per click) where a business pays the major search engines (or large websites) every time their ad is clicked. But when that ad is linked to a dedicated number, how do we go about tracking conversions that come via calls?
Tracking this metric is a crucial component of identifying how effective campaigns are. You want real insights into how PPC works for your company.
What Are PPC Calls?
When you’re mounting a PPC campaign, you might choose to dedicate a number, or numbers, to those ads. These numbers connect to your business line (or specific and relevant teams within your business) and can be either standard numbers or toll-free.
Depending on how many campaigns you’re running, a number may be assigned to each campaign, product, or landing page.
You can choose to insert these numbers on your website as a simple piece of script that changes the number usually seen by site visitors. These numbers can correlate to specific triggers you choose, such as the customer’s geographic location, the referral point that led to them calling you, or a specific PPC ad or keyword.
Ideally, you want FCR every time. And what is FCR? It’s your ability to resolve or convert a customer’s call the first time they contact you.
But how do you go about tracking these numbers and associated conversions? And does tracking them offer substantive benefits?
The Benefits of PPC Call Tracking
Image Source
Despite the many channels available in the digital age, lots of customers still want to talk to a real person when making a purchase. This can be highly effective in achieving conversions as customers can ask questions in real-time and make an informed decision there and then.
The data you get from PPC call tracking offers a range of insights:
- The origins of how the customer found you. This is especially useful if you have campaigns in several online locations
- Call patterns. Helps you identify peak times and peak days when customers are most likely to call. It can also help you ensure you have a good call queue system in place.
- SEO & keywords. Good call tracking can identify which keywords or phrases led to the call which can help with future planning.
- Split (A/B) testing. Call tracking can help you see which landing pages perform best, assisting in optimizing your site.
- Performance. By getting an accurate overview of how many conversions you made for each campaign or ad, you can better plan your future campaigns.
Google Ads
Image Source
While many businesses’ first choice for call tracking is Google Ads, it’s not ideal and can be difficult to install. However, it can be of great value when set up properly or used with a third-party software solution to get the best from your data.
To begin, you should:
- Set up conversion tracking; you do this in the conversions section of your Google Ads toolbox.
- Create a new tracking script based on calls.
- This is where Google Ads tracking gets tricky. You are offered three options but can only choose one, though the reality is you’ll likely want to pick all of them.
- To bypass this issue, create a conversion script for each of the three options.
- Choose ‘yes’ for the ‘include in conversions’ option.
- Set a bottom end for call length to be identified as conversions.
With point 6, we come to where the issue lies with only using Google Ads tracking to define metrics. For example, say you choose ‘five minutes’ as your low end for call length. While five minutes may be the average time in which your agents manage a conversion, a call of that length doesn’t mean you have converted a sale every time.
So, while Google Ads tracking may give you some idea of how your ads are performing, it doesn’t give you an accurate idea of how many calls were actual conversions. It could show you you had 100 calls in a certain period, but you don’t know from the data how many were conversions. To get a more accurate idea, you need to bring in some third-party software,
Third-Party Software
We already utilize the best marketing automation tools to boost conversion rates. Thinking about tools is no different when it comes to PPC. Just as you want the best network security companies protecting your data, so you want to choose the best third-party software for tracking PPC metrics.
If you’re going to rely on calls via PPC as a major source of sales conversions, you need more accurate data on how they are performing, and to do that, you need to utilize third-party software. Every business knows good data helps inform decisions when it comes to new campaigns, so you need a more in-depth idea of what’s going on.
If you want more accurate data, you will need third-party call tracking tools to provide more detailed overviews of your calls and conversions. The sort of features you may want to look for include:
- Keyword tracking. Sometimes you want more details than what ad the call came from. When you’re able to link a call to a search for a specific keyword, it not only identifies what the caller wants and what their point of origin was but can help you plan future keyword use.
- Source tracking. You won’t be able to track keywords on every platform you use. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are more driven by social interaction and engagement or particular demographic groups. Being able to track those sources will let you see what ads and platforms work best for you.
- Browser tracking. We’re constantly looking for ways to improve the performance of both our website as a whole and individual landing pages. By being able to track what pages on our site individuals visited before calling, we can see patterns in their behavior and what things interest them.
- Recording calls. Being able to listen back on previous calls can be of huge benefit to future performance, especially from the perspective of training. Observing how agents convert (or don’t convert) can help tweak agent performance, scripts, etc. so we can make improvements in how we deliver sales calls.
- Customer data. Having good customer data (location, name, contact details, etc.) can be of assistance when it comes to future marketing. It can help target customers with specific promotions such as free shipping to their location.
- Integration. You will likely still be using Google Analytics and Google Ads and, if so, you are going to want a third-party tool that integrates with those platforms and lets you set up goals for tracking conversions.
Having a great PPC tool can help you improve your account performance. Knowing exactly what you require from it is the first step to choosing the correct tool.
Tips on How to Use PPC Tracking Properly
Image Source
Not all calls or customers are equal. And if you do think of them as being so, you will never get a true view of the effectiveness of the various ads and campaigns you have employed. Consider some of the statistics below:
- Only around 25% of your leads are legitimate and will advance to sales.
- Businesses that are good at nurturing leads generate 50% more revenue at a 33% lower cost.
- 57% of B2B companies prioritize turning qualified leads into conversions.
So it is very much worth your while to think carefully about how you will track calls and what data you want to look at. Here are a few tips to help you.
- Make A/B (split) testing a regular exercise so you can see what combinations (ads, landing pages, keywords, etc.) work best together and improve lead quality.
- Local focus. Where possible, tie local numbers to a customer’s location. If they perceive you as being ‘more local’ than other businesses, you have a better chance of conversions.
- Separation. If you have multiple ads or campaigns running simultaneously, there is little point in having them all routed to the same number as it will muddle your data. Create dedicated numbers or extensions for each separate campaign.
- Good routing. If you handle a large number of calls, ensure those calls go to the staff best equipped to deal with them. Different teams may have different product-specific knowledge so use the strengths and knowledge your teams already possess.
The Takeaway
Calls remain an integral part of how we do business, and while most calls will be initiated by the customer, we should also consider what is an outbound call within our current model. While the customer may call you first, it may be you need to call them back or contact them later with more information.
There are many different ways to increase conversion rates, such as using interactive content to boost leads and conversions. With the likelihood that you offer an omnichannel experience, you need to segment every area to see what works best for you. By tracking your PPC call conversions, you can ensure you are focusing on the most important factors.
This is a guest post. The views and opinions expressed by the author are solely their own and do not represent that of Optmyzr.
About the author
Elea is the SEO Content Optimization manager for RingCentral, a call center solution company the leader in global enterprise communication. She has more than a decade’s worth of experience in on-page optimization, editorial production, and digital publishing. She spends her free time learning new things.
Call tracking is a form of conversion tracking that allows you to determine how many phone calls you’re receiving due to your pay-per-click advertising.
Let’s say you’re running an ad that offers free project management tools as a lead magnet. Your landing page is designed to capture leads. However, not everyone who lands on this page will fill out your contact form. Many of them will call you instead. If you’re not tracking your calls, you won’t be aware of how these calls are being prompted.
For example, if you generate 2000 leads a month and about 40% are calls, you are essentially working blind with a large proportion of your PPC budget. You’re entirely ignorant of the source of 800 potential customers. With call tracking, you can optimize your marketing to drive more calls and more success.
There are two types of calls you can track. The first type is those received directly from your ads. This is when people search on a smartphone and directly press the phone call button next to your advert. You will be charged for each call you receive in the same way that regular PPC ads charge you for every click.
The other type is phone calls prompted by your website. You receive these types of calls when someone clicks on your ad, lands on your website, sees your phone number, and manually dials it into their phone. This type of call is inherently more difficult to track because the conversion is not registered in your PPC campaign analytics.
When executed successfully, call tracking can help you to refine and improve your marketing campaigns. However, you need to be aware of the pitfalls. Here are 6 common mistakes that will harm your PPC campaign.
Image Source
1. Not using Dynamic Call Tracking.
So you’ve set up your pay-per-click ads on multiple platforms. You’ve got big shiny calls to action which encourage the viewer to give you a call. But when the calls come flooding in, you don’t know by which advert or platform each call has been triggered.
This is where Dynamic Call Tracking comes into play. It allows you to track what was previously untrackable. Dynamic Call Tracking enables you to track or change your phone number’s last three or four digits based on the site visitor’s source. Just as you use SKUs to track your inventory’s movement, you can use Dynamic Call Tracking to track your inbound leads’ movement.
You can set this up just for Google Ads traffic, Facebook traffic, or for all sources of traffic if you find this helpful. The last three or four digits of your phone number change to allow the Dynamic Call Tracking provider to identify that a tracking number has been called. This allows the conversion to be logged.
Most importantly, in the case of Google Ads, especially, is the ability to find out the exact keyword that prompted the phone call.
Image Source: Wordstream
2. Not having an omnichannel approach.
Most businesses make the mistake of not following up on calls adequately with an omnichannel approach. Just because an interaction starts as a phone call doesn’t mean that communication should be limited to this form of communication. You should implement an omnichannel sales process, which only begins with the calls you receive.
This means that your inbound call agent doesn’t just handle calls; they act as a complete virtual customer assistant. They should make sure that all your calls are logged into a CRM tool. These calls should then be followed up with the same attention you would dedicate to any other type of customer.
If you’re collecting an email address on a call with a user, you should send an automated follow-up email to wrap up the call with an actionable message inside. Not only does this keep the customer engaged, but you can start to track the open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates of these emails per phone number.
By doing this, you’ll see critical leading indicators of call quality beyond what call times alone can show you. Additionally, you’ll get quicker feedback than if you just wait for sales reports to come back.
3. Not scoring leads.
The concept of lead scoring, or call scoring, relates to the performance of different call sources. How meaningful or actionable are they? Every online advertiser knows that not all clicks are created equal. Many factors affect the value of a click, such as the keyword searched within the ad copy and the site the ad was running on.
Call scoring extends this concept. Be mindful of specific metrics that will help you to understand the actual value of a call better. A sophisticated marketer would never put a flat price on the value of a click to their website without evaluating what happened after a visitor’s arrival. Similarly, you should never assess a call campaign’s success by considering how many calls you received alone.
The easiest thing to look at beyond raw call count is call duration. It’s not a perfect metric, but it can paint you a much more informative picture than your raw call count.
For instance, you may find that calls that last under two minutes are unlikely to be of any value to your business. There is no meaningful customer engagement. Rather than counting the number of total calls you receive, you would be better off counting the number of phone calls that last more than two minutes.
Even more crucially, take a look at the ratio of long to short calls. Not only will the short calls be likely to have little or no value, but a noticeably higher ratio of short calls from a particular source often indicates below-average quality on longer calls from the same source.
Image Source
4. Not calculating the expected revenue per call.
While looking at call time is a step in the right direction, it’s certainly not all you should rely on. If you’re not able to discover the results of calls yourself, make sure you set up feedback loops to integrate the true sale or revenue numbers.
You should be retrieving the actual revenue number for each of your inbound call tracking numbers. Divide this by the number of total calls to calculate the average expected revenue per call. Make sure this is factored into the revenue calculations for the pages on which these calls are generated. Ensure it’s also incorporated into the ROI metric for the media spend that it took to attract the user.
Another vital element to increase the expected revenue per call is to prioritize the distribution of your calls. This allows you to make sure that your top-performing phone agents are fielding your highest value calls instead of your agents in training. It’s effective business management to optimize your call distribution in this way, as it can significantly impact your calls’ overall value.
5. Not optimizing keywords.
Another common error is not optimizing keywords based on the data received from tracking your calls. This is a vital part of marketing for small business.
Let’s say you have 100 keywords in your Google Ads account. You see that 20 of those keywords have a reasonable cost per lead and cost per sale based on onsite conversions. But it’s the other 80 keywords in the account that cause an issue. How do you know which ones to turn up, which ones to turn down, or which ones to turn off altogether?
Some of these keywords may be costing you money without any return whatsoever. To maximize the value of your PPC budget, you need to optimize your keywords.
To this end, knowing the value of every keyword in your Google Ads or Facebook account is so important. You can obtain more customers by allocating more spend towards the keywords or ads that are proven converters. Of course, you should also move your spend away from weak areas. You must cut wastage to get a better PPC ad performance from the same spend.
Image Source
6. Not recording calls.
The final mistake people make when call-tracking is not recording calls. Many people don’t record calls because they use a software solution like Twist, which has limited file storage. Many other people just don’t understand its benefits.
When you record your calls, you can access and re-listen to them at any given time. Recorded calls are a bank of information that you can use to make adjustments to your PPC campaign.
Listening to calls allows you to evaluate the types of leads you are garnering from a particular source. How strongly does this audience and its problems overlap with those of your target audience? Is the source a location worthy of your PPC budget spend?
Recording calls allows you to monitor and assess the work of your call center. It will enable you to complete a call center quality assurance evaluation sheet and determine whether your staff are doing their best job to help prospective clients get the answers they need. Are employees using the tools you’ve given them? Are they using excellent sales skills to resolve customer queries? Listening to the recorded calls makes it much easier to determine whether inbound leads are being dealt with professionally.
This is a guest post. The content here is for informational purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by the author are solely their own and do not represent that of Optmyzr.
About the Author
Victorio Duran III is the Associate SEO Director at RingCentral, a global leader in cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions. He has over 13 years of extensive involvement on web and digital operations with diverse experience as web engineer, product manager, and digital marketing strategist.
Regular Pages
In the modern and competitive world of business, not only does every tactic count but knowing the effectiveness of each tactic we employ is of the utmost importance. When we invest time and money into one particular marketing avenue, we want to be sure we’re getting a good ROI on those investments.
If you sell products online, you want to use different channels and platforms and to be able to track all relevant metrics. To do so, you first need to understand certain concepts and methods of tracking.
For example, what does inbound calls mean? These can come from a variety of sources and be a major source of sales and conversions. We also want to know how to optimize eCommerce conversion funnels to drive sales.
One popular form of marketing/advertising is PPC (pay per click) where a business pays the major search engines (or large websites) every time their ad is clicked. But when that ad is linked to a dedicated number, how do we go about tracking conversions that come via calls?
Tracking this metric is a crucial component of identifying how effective campaigns are. You want real insights into how PPC works for your company.
What Are PPC Calls?
When you’re mounting a PPC campaign, you might choose to dedicate a number, or numbers, to those ads. These numbers connect to your business line (or specific and relevant teams within your business) and can be either standard numbers or toll-free.
Depending on how many campaigns you’re running, a number may be assigned to each campaign, product, or landing page.
You can choose to insert these numbers on your website as a simple piece of script that changes the number usually seen by site visitors. These numbers can correlate to specific triggers you choose, such as the customer’s geographic location, the referral point that led to them calling you, or a specific PPC ad or keyword.
Ideally, you want FCR every time. And what is FCR? It’s your ability to resolve or convert a customer’s call the first time they contact you.
But how do you go about tracking these numbers and associated conversions? And does tracking them offer substantive benefits?
The Benefits of PPC Call Tracking
Image Source
Despite the many channels available in the digital age, lots of customers still want to talk to a real person when making a purchase. This can be highly effective in achieving conversions as customers can ask questions in real-time and make an informed decision there and then.
The data you get from PPC call tracking offers a range of insights:
- The origins of how the customer found you. This is especially useful if you have campaigns in several online locations
- Call patterns. Helps you identify peak times and peak days when customers are most likely to call. It can also help you ensure you have a good call queue system in place.
- SEO & keywords. Good call tracking can identify which keywords or phrases led to the call which can help with future planning.
- Split (A/B) testing. Call tracking can help you see which landing pages perform best, assisting in optimizing your site.
- Performance. By getting an accurate overview of how many conversions you made for each campaign or ad, you can better plan your future campaigns.
Google Ads
Image Source
While many businesses’ first choice for call tracking is Google Ads, it’s not ideal and can be difficult to install. However, it can be of great value when set up properly or used with a third-party software solution to get the best from your data.
To begin, you should:
- Set up conversion tracking; you do this in the conversions section of your Google Ads toolbox.
- Create a new tracking script based on calls.
- This is where Google Ads tracking gets tricky. You are offered three options but can only choose one, though the reality is you’ll likely want to pick all of them.
- To bypass this issue, create a conversion script for each of the three options.
- Choose ‘yes’ for the ‘include in conversions’ option.
- Set a bottom end for call length to be identified as conversions.
With point 6, we come to where the issue lies with only using Google Ads tracking to define metrics. For example, say you choose ‘five minutes’ as your low end for call length. While five minutes may be the average time in which your agents manage a conversion, a call of that length doesn’t mean you have converted a sale every time.
So, while Google Ads tracking may give you some idea of how your ads are performing, it doesn’t give you an accurate idea of how many calls were actual conversions. It could show you you had 100 calls in a certain period, but you don’t know from the data how many were conversions. To get a more accurate idea, you need to bring in some third-party software,
Third-Party Software
We already utilize the best marketing automation tools to boost conversion rates. Thinking about tools is no different when it comes to PPC. Just as you want the best network security companies protecting your data, so you want to choose the best third-party software for tracking PPC metrics.
If you’re going to rely on calls via PPC as a major source of sales conversions, you need more accurate data on how they are performing, and to do that, you need to utilize third-party software. Every business knows good data helps inform decisions when it comes to new campaigns, so you need a more in-depth idea of what’s going on.
If you want more accurate data, you will need third-party call tracking tools to provide more detailed overviews of your calls and conversions. The sort of features you may want to look for include:
- Keyword tracking. Sometimes you want more details than what ad the call came from. When you’re able to link a call to a search for a specific keyword, it not only identifies what the caller wants and what their point of origin was but can help you plan future keyword use.
- Source tracking. You won’t be able to track keywords on every platform you use. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are more driven by social interaction and engagement or particular demographic groups. Being able to track those sources will let you see what ads and platforms work best for you.
- Browser tracking. We’re constantly looking for ways to improve the performance of both our website as a whole and individual landing pages. By being able to track what pages on our site individuals visited before calling, we can see patterns in their behavior and what things interest them.
- Recording calls. Being able to listen back on previous calls can be of huge benefit to future performance, especially from the perspective of training. Observing how agents convert (or don’t convert) can help tweak agent performance, scripts, etc. so we can make improvements in how we deliver sales calls.
- Customer data. Having good customer data (location, name, contact details, etc.) can be of assistance when it comes to future marketing. It can help target customers with specific promotions such as free shipping to their location.
- Integration. You will likely still be using Google Analytics and Google Ads and, if so, you are going to want a third-party tool that integrates with those platforms and lets you set up goals for tracking conversions.
Having a great PPC tool can help you improve your account performance. Knowing exactly what you require from it is the first step to choosing the correct tool.
Tips on How to Use PPC Tracking Properly
Image Source
Not all calls or customers are equal. And if you do think of them as being so, you will never get a true view of the effectiveness of the various ads and campaigns you have employed. Consider some of the statistics below:
- Only around 25% of your leads are legitimate and will advance to sales.
- Businesses that are good at nurturing leads generate 50% more revenue at a 33% lower cost.
- 57% of B2B companies prioritize turning qualified leads into conversions.
So it is very much worth your while to think carefully about how you will track calls and what data you want to look at. Here are a few tips to help you.
- Make A/B (split) testing a regular exercise so you can see what combinations (ads, landing pages, keywords, etc.) work best together and improve lead quality.
- Local focus. Where possible, tie local numbers to a customer’s location. If they perceive you as being ‘more local’ than other businesses, you have a better chance of conversions.
- Separation. If you have multiple ads or campaigns running simultaneously, there is little point in having them all routed to the same number as it will muddle your data. Create dedicated numbers or extensions for each separate campaign.
- Good routing. If you handle a large number of calls, ensure those calls go to the staff best equipped to deal with them. Different teams may have different product-specific knowledge so use the strengths and knowledge your teams already possess.
The Takeaway
Calls remain an integral part of how we do business, and while most calls will be initiated by the customer, we should also consider what is an outbound call within our current model. While the customer may call you first, it may be you need to call them back or contact them later with more information.
There are many different ways to increase conversion rates, such as using interactive content to boost leads and conversions. With the likelihood that you offer an omnichannel experience, you need to segment every area to see what works best for you. By tracking your PPC call conversions, you can ensure you are focusing on the most important factors.
This is a guest post. The views and opinions expressed by the author are solely their own and do not represent that of Optmyzr.
About the author
Elea is the SEO Content Optimization manager for RingCentral, a call center solution company the leader in global enterprise communication. She has more than a decade’s worth of experience in on-page optimization, editorial production, and digital publishing. She spends her free time learning new things.
Call tracking is a form of conversion tracking that allows you to determine how many phone calls you’re receiving due to your pay-per-click advertising.
Let’s say you’re running an ad that offers free project management tools as a lead magnet. Your landing page is designed to capture leads. However, not everyone who lands on this page will fill out your contact form. Many of them will call you instead. If you’re not tracking your calls, you won’t be aware of how these calls are being prompted.
For example, if you generate 2000 leads a month and about 40% are calls, you are essentially working blind with a large proportion of your PPC budget. You’re entirely ignorant of the source of 800 potential customers. With call tracking, you can optimize your marketing to drive more calls and more success.
There are two types of calls you can track. The first type is those received directly from your ads. This is when people search on a smartphone and directly press the phone call button next to your advert. You will be charged for each call you receive in the same way that regular PPC ads charge you for every click.
The other type is phone calls prompted by your website. You receive these types of calls when someone clicks on your ad, lands on your website, sees your phone number, and manually dials it into their phone. This type of call is inherently more difficult to track because the conversion is not registered in your PPC campaign analytics.
When executed successfully, call tracking can help you to refine and improve your marketing campaigns. However, you need to be aware of the pitfalls. Here are 6 common mistakes that will harm your PPC campaign.
Image Source
1. Not using Dynamic Call Tracking.
So you’ve set up your pay-per-click ads on multiple platforms. You’ve got big shiny calls to action which encourage the viewer to give you a call. But when the calls come flooding in, you don’t know by which advert or platform each call has been triggered.
This is where Dynamic Call Tracking comes into play. It allows you to track what was previously untrackable. Dynamic Call Tracking enables you to track or change your phone number’s last three or four digits based on the site visitor’s source. Just as you use SKUs to track your inventory’s movement, you can use Dynamic Call Tracking to track your inbound leads’ movement.
You can set this up just for Google Ads traffic, Facebook traffic, or for all sources of traffic if you find this helpful. The last three or four digits of your phone number change to allow the Dynamic Call Tracking provider to identify that a tracking number has been called. This allows the conversion to be logged.
Most importantly, in the case of Google Ads, especially, is the ability to find out the exact keyword that prompted the phone call.
Image Source: Wordstream
2. Not having an omnichannel approach.
Most businesses make the mistake of not following up on calls adequately with an omnichannel approach. Just because an interaction starts as a phone call doesn’t mean that communication should be limited to this form of communication. You should implement an omnichannel sales process, which only begins with the calls you receive.
This means that your inbound call agent doesn’t just handle calls; they act as a complete virtual customer assistant. They should make sure that all your calls are logged into a CRM tool. These calls should then be followed up with the same attention you would dedicate to any other type of customer.
If you’re collecting an email address on a call with a user, you should send an automated follow-up email to wrap up the call with an actionable message inside. Not only does this keep the customer engaged, but you can start to track the open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates of these emails per phone number.
By doing this, you’ll see critical leading indicators of call quality beyond what call times alone can show you. Additionally, you’ll get quicker feedback than if you just wait for sales reports to come back.
3. Not scoring leads.
The concept of lead scoring, or call scoring, relates to the performance of different call sources. How meaningful or actionable are they? Every online advertiser knows that not all clicks are created equal. Many factors affect the value of a click, such as the keyword searched within the ad copy and the site the ad was running on.
Call scoring extends this concept. Be mindful of specific metrics that will help you to understand the actual value of a call better. A sophisticated marketer would never put a flat price on the value of a click to their website without evaluating what happened after a visitor’s arrival. Similarly, you should never assess a call campaign’s success by considering how many calls you received alone.
The easiest thing to look at beyond raw call count is call duration. It’s not a perfect metric, but it can paint you a much more informative picture than your raw call count.
For instance, you may find that calls that last under two minutes are unlikely to be of any value to your business. There is no meaningful customer engagement. Rather than counting the number of total calls you receive, you would be better off counting the number of phone calls that last more than two minutes.
Even more crucially, take a look at the ratio of long to short calls. Not only will the short calls be likely to have little or no value, but a noticeably higher ratio of short calls from a particular source often indicates below-average quality on longer calls from the same source.
Image Source
4. Not calculating the expected revenue per call.
While looking at call time is a step in the right direction, it’s certainly not all you should rely on. If you’re not able to discover the results of calls yourself, make sure you set up feedback loops to integrate the true sale or revenue numbers.
You should be retrieving the actual revenue number for each of your inbound call tracking numbers. Divide this by the number of total calls to calculate the average expected revenue per call. Make sure this is factored into the revenue calculations for the pages on which these calls are generated. Ensure it’s also incorporated into the ROI metric for the media spend that it took to attract the user.
Another vital element to increase the expected revenue per call is to prioritize the distribution of your calls. This allows you to make sure that your top-performing phone agents are fielding your highest value calls instead of your agents in training. It’s effective business management to optimize your call distribution in this way, as it can significantly impact your calls’ overall value.
5. Not optimizing keywords.
Another common error is not optimizing keywords based on the data received from tracking your calls. This is a vital part of marketing for small business.
Let’s say you have 100 keywords in your Google Ads account. You see that 20 of those keywords have a reasonable cost per lead and cost per sale based on onsite conversions. But it’s the other 80 keywords in the account that cause an issue. How do you know which ones to turn up, which ones to turn down, or which ones to turn off altogether?
Some of these keywords may be costing you money without any return whatsoever. To maximize the value of your PPC budget, you need to optimize your keywords.
To this end, knowing the value of every keyword in your Google Ads or Facebook account is so important. You can obtain more customers by allocating more spend towards the keywords or ads that are proven converters. Of course, you should also move your spend away from weak areas. You must cut wastage to get a better PPC ad performance from the same spend.
Image Source
6. Not recording calls.
The final mistake people make when call-tracking is not recording calls. Many people don’t record calls because they use a software solution like Twist, which has limited file storage. Many other people just don’t understand its benefits.
When you record your calls, you can access and re-listen to them at any given time. Recorded calls are a bank of information that you can use to make adjustments to your PPC campaign.
Listening to calls allows you to evaluate the types of leads you are garnering from a particular source. How strongly does this audience and its problems overlap with those of your target audience? Is the source a location worthy of your PPC budget spend?
Recording calls allows you to monitor and assess the work of your call center. It will enable you to complete a call center quality assurance evaluation sheet and determine whether your staff are doing their best job to help prospective clients get the answers they need. Are employees using the tools you’ve given them? Are they using excellent sales skills to resolve customer queries? Listening to the recorded calls makes it much easier to determine whether inbound leads are being dealt with professionally.
This is a guest post. The content here is for informational purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by the author are solely their own and do not represent that of Optmyzr.
About the Author
Victorio Duran III is the Associate SEO Director at RingCentral, a global leader in cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions. He has over 13 years of extensive involvement on web and digital operations with diverse experience as web engineer, product manager, and digital marketing strategist.
