This post originally appeared on LinkedIn Pulse
If you are considering investing time and resources into understanding what marketing activities are driving your inbound phone calls, you’ve come to the right place. Below I’ve listed some common early-stage questions and their answers to help you get started!
Should my business be doing this?
Any business that cares about phone calls should be investing in intelligence to understand what drives their calls. If any of those calls originate from paid search, you should definitely be tracking their source, campaign and keyword so you can attribute any revenue from those calls back to your paid search campaigns. That being said, here are some industries that see strong benefits from dynamic call tracking:
- automotive, both new/used car sales and service
- home services – think home security systems, plumbers, locksmiths, landscaping etc.
- healthcare, including senior living and dentistry
- travel and hospitality
- insurance, financial services and legal
What can I learn?
You know paid search is driving phone calls to your business, but how much do you really know? You probably track which sources drive the most leads and which campaigns are working, but how can you optimize? The answer is keyword level attribution for your phone call leads. By using a pool of phone numbers you can assign each unique visitor their own dynamic tracking line and capture the keyword they searched before calling your business. Knowing which keywords convert at the highest rates will arm you with the knowledge you need to optimize your bids for higher performing phone calls. What about other marketing channels? Anywhere you put a phone number you should be tracking how many calls come in, whether it’s a Bing ad, a direct mail piece or a billboard. All of this is possible with dynamic call tracking.
What can I do with this data?
Optimize your paid search bids. Spend the first month or so just collecting data and working to understand your phone call attribution picture. Once you have a solid grasp of the patterns and flow of your calls, start leveraging that knowledge to make changes to your strategy. Simply put, spend more money on the sources, campaigns and keywords that drive the most calls.
How can I automate?
Step one is to choose the right call intelligence provider, preferably one with strong partnerships. This way you can not only be sure they can integrate with your current systems, but also that they will be able to facilitate your growth as you bring on new marketing tech over time. The long term goal would be to feed this data back into your marketing technology to allow for real time bid adjustments based on conversion indicators passed back from your call intelligence platform. This ensures that your bids are aligned with what is happening over the phone, bridging that online to offline attribution gap.
