It’s tempting to get caught up in the many online metrics of your website when analysing your online performance: online check-outs, visitors, page views, paid search conversions, etc. Yet the phone conversions secured from your website are equally important.

If you’re selling online, call tracking may appear counter-intuitive. Businesses tend to prefer to drive sales via their websites as it’s more cost effective, and quite simply, quicker. However, most online retailers are still receiving sales phone calls from customers too - often customers want to speak with a real person to get the reassurance they need.

With phone calls still providing valuable insight about your online efforts and customer behaviour, it’s imperative that you use your call data to optimise your website’s performance. Here’s how you can do just that.

Work out which web pages generate call traffic

So, you have a strong web presence, an engaged social media following, a slick website.... but is it enough?

Now you can analyse the complete online journey of your customer with a dedicated tracking phone number. Individual telephone lines can show how a prospect arrived at your website; perhaps they clicked on an ad or found you via organic search results - to what pages they’ve visited on your site. This information can provide invaluable customer insight.

Let’s take a look at an example customer journey taken from our call tracking report:

The visitor arrived via a PPC ad on Google. The search term used was: “social media marketing” and this was picked up using the destination URL’s keyword’ parameter. The customer then called us, and then went on to view our home page after the phone call ended.

Being able to track the customer journey like this means you are able to see how your visitors engage with you using real data. It can help you work out what areas of your website are working, or not working, and how you can improve it.

Pinpoint new opportunities

Dig further into the sources of your telephone calls and you can identify areas of your site that are not driving sales enquiries and could benefit from further development. This information is a gold mine for finding potential opportunities for business growth. You can find out what new products or services are in demand or use the data to research new target markets.

Getting your keywords right is crucial to the success of your site’s sales. Your call tracking software can help you focus SEO efforts by providing accurate data on which keywords your audience are using to find you. This will help you produce ads that are more targeted.

Refine your marketing strategy and improve your inbound leads

If you feel that up to half the money you spend on ads is being wasted (but you don’t know which half), using integrated PPC call tracking can help you track down where the money you spend is having least effect.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of spending large amounts of cash on numerous marketing campaigns thinking that a scattergun approach is best for targeting a bigger audience. This is not the case. Assigning a call tracking number to each marketing campaigns will help quantify your performance as accurately as possible.

When you use PPC call tracking as an integral part of your website page strategy, it will help you understand how your landing pages, messages, keywords and campaigns are all working for you. Detailed reports allow for you to pinpoint the most ineffective areas of all of these, refine your marketing strategy and divert your budget to those that are producing higher response levels at a low cost per response.

You might think that all of your customer journey information can be found in Google Analytics, but your site is generating more offline conversions than you think. Not to mention that telephone calls have a stronger purchasing signal than the majority of enquiries, so it’s important that you’re able to relate these with your wider lead attribution to get a full and genuine picture of your lead generation.

 

By Zoe-Lee Skelton. 

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