Search has always been at the heart of the Internet and as advertisers and marketers we’ve all put a lot of effort into mastering the art of search advertising to boost the traffic to our websites or make a sale online.
Through PPC and search advertising we are able to track new sales leads and build up a better picture about our customers’ journey, from intention to buy through to purchase, but are we really making the best out of all the data we are capturing?
We put together 5 common mistakes we all make in search advertising when it comes to the data we capture and the way we use it. These are all mistakes we’ve made ourselves and now we want to share what we’ve learned with you.
1. Mis-tracking advertising leads
Many of the online visitors you attract through your online efforts who actually end up buying from you are not attributed to online.
When a visitor fills out a form on your web site, it probably ends up as a lead in your CRM tool. If this then transforms into a successful sale 6 weeks from now, is it attributed as an online sale or was it recognised as a sale that was made by a member of your team? The trouble is consumers don’t shop in a strictly linear way and so you need to track where the lead came in, even when deals are closed several months later.
Unless we take the time to fully understand the true customer journey and the conversion points, we’re denying ourselves the opportunity to make the most of our CRM data in the future. This approach is the result of Inattentional blindness.
2. Using the wrong tools.
Inattentional blindness is not exclusive to us as advertisers, even our tools suffer from it.
99.9% of brands and SMBs around the world provide a telephone number to contact them and most of us take advantage of this option, especially when using our smartphone. For example, you’re sitting in a café having a coffee and searching for a car rental provider nearby, and you click on one of the ads that pop up on top of the Google search results. You discover on their mobile website they have exactly the type of car that you’re looking for and you click to give them a call and make your booking.
In my experience, 6 out of 10 mobile searchers are doing this. So how is it that most marketers rely purely on Google Analytics day-to-day and never see any data on phone calls? As Google Analytics basically owns the world of online performance reporting, we live in a world where most online marketers assume their visitors buy exclusively online and never pick up the phone to complete a purchase. This is of course a misconception and proof that Google Analytics alone is simply not enough when tracking the customer journey.
3. Not looking beyond the click.
Using a call extension in your mobile Ads on Google doesn’t mean you are buying calls.
You can add your own call extension to a mobile ad for every country around the world. From the perspective of the consumer, this makes your business easily accessible by phone at a reasonable cost. Google charge you for every click on that call extension whether it’s a true sales opportunity or not. The trouble is that those clicks simply launch your dialer and then the customer has to click again to actually make the call.
On average 30% of the consumers who clicked on the call extension did it by accident. Because the screen is small, we have all done that. Hence, when you are charged for 10 clicks by Google, it’s hard to tell if any of them were intentional. Maybe they all were accidental and no one was connected at all. Using tracking technology that looks beyond the click this can be overcome, as it’s simple to start targeting the valuable clicks, instead of the accidental clicks.
4. Assuming call extension is enough to track leads by phone.
If have a business that operates in the USA and the UK and you’re using call extensions in your mobile ads on Google that show you the click, the connected call and the duration of the call, does that mean that you’ve got everything covered? Sadly, not.
9 out of 10 smartphone users rather click through to your mobile website to read more about your services and then they make the call. Hence, you are still missing data on 90% of the inbound sales opportunities in your tracking tools, be they Google Analytics, Adwords or a bid management tool.
If you are using a bid management tool, make sure you also use post click through tracking technology that captures phone calls, on a keyword level, and feed this data into your bid management tool in real time. If you have started to use high frequency bidding, it’s a disaster if you have delays in your data feed.
5. Not spending time to understanding user journeys.
Most consumers visit your web site several times before making the decision to transact, either online or by talking to someone at your call centre. The user journey is often multi-faceted and sees the consumer take a cross channel approach to get the information about what they choose to buy.
The visitor’s purchase may be triggered by a display ad on their first visit. The second via an organic search 3 days later. The third is the result of a paid search ad when the consumer is researching alternatives. And finally, the fourth could be a display ad using retargeting. Which do you attribute the value of this sale? Most tools use last click attribution. By changing your attribution rules, you can quickly see an uplift in sales.
Now that we know we can no longer ignore data from phone calls, let’s see how you can readdress your approach to search advertising, make some of these simple changes in your next campaign and see the results it will reap - we really think they will make a massive difference.
By Carl Homquist, CEO of Freespee.
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