Wil Reynolds Wil Reynolds

February 18, 2009

Search Marketing Companies – phone tracking can save your budgets!

Search marketing budgets are not safe, many agencies are seeing cuts in search spend, there’s one simple way to make sure your clients are not cutting budgets on something that really is working…close the holes in the lead tracking process.

Today Laura, sent out this post on Google Analytics integration with phone tracking and Liveperson. At SEER we have vetted a ton of companies that do phone tracking, we started this process about 18 months ago with Voicestar and liked many things about them (especially the API).

But I’ll tell you a story on why now more than ever every search marketing company should be doing phone tracking. Lets start with a real example:

One of our clients found that after implementing phone lead tracking that we were under reporting our results by 50%!!! In other words if we reported 100 online leads in a month, they actually had 150 that came from search! We were turning a positive ROI at 100 leads, but by finding this out we changed the entire economics of the campaign, we could change positions, we could enable keywords that we thought were NOT returning a positive ROI, just to name a few. This resulted in increased budgets and more leads because we had a more accurate view of our impact down to phone calls.

Sage Lewis wrote this story comparing 3 phone tracking services again we liked Voicestar, but their pricing is REALLY complicated and high, however their system is robust, so again, we liked it – but I really like seeing more competition in this space, Mongoose has pricing that is MUCH easier to understand.

With the post from Google analytics above it just got me thinking that if your SEO/SEM/PPC agency is experiencing tightening budgets you should have your clients implement call tracking especially for B2B clients and even for complex lead gen / and e-commerce sites.

Our client was a B2C client with a very VERY basic form for leads and they were still under reporting our leads by 50%! Can you imagine the B2B marketers out there selling complex software solutions that may have a longer sales cycle and more questions?

Why should you go through the hassle of vetting phone companies? Simple, by implementing call tracking you are helping your clients get a more accurate view of the traffic you are driving and possibly showing them a more accurate (and hopefully better) ROI. Its the right thing to do!

Be ethical! – Remember you have to take out calls from branded search if you want to be 100% on the up and up and not take credit for people calling in because they searched for the client name. Taking credit for branded search from an SEO campaign is one of the ways you can get ripped off by SEO’s.

If your client says that they don’t have the money to do this, I am thinking that in this economy they can not afford NOT to know the true value on the leads driven by their search campaigns and their true search ROI. Someone asking “how did you hear about us” on the phone is just not cutting it in this economy. Mongoose is offering a GREAT credit which basically makes the first month free, and it integrates with several popular web analytics tools. If you decided Mongoose is not right for you and you go with another solution but want to save money, you may only need to run call tracking for 3 months to see the percentage of calls to online leads ratio and apply that as an estimate of online leads going forward, allowing you to drop the provider after a while.

We are going to be playing with this soon and will update you guys with what we find.

What are you waiting for?!! Go save (or increase your budgets) by implementing call tracking!

4 COMMENTS

  • Jon Payne says:
    February 19, 2009 @ 9:49 pm

    Wil – I’ve played around with Voicestar and others but ultimately typically choose not to use call tracking services for my clients. The main issues relate to not wanting to display something other than their main number on their website. They would pretty much have to commit to that number forever, right? I wouldn’t want people saving that number, calling it a year later and getting no answer. On second thought though I guess they’d just do a search and get the new number. Anyhow, have you experienced any push-back related to that? Most of our clients do their own internal call tracking by asking how the prospect found them, though that certainly isn’t terribly accurate either. We just figure the leads we drive are the number coming from the forms we track plus “x” number of calls.

  • JoAnne says:
    February 25, 2009 @ 1:46 pm

    Depending on the nature of the company and the type of business, I can understand a hesitation to display toll free numbers that vary from query to query. At the same time, though, it’s probably safe to say that most people don’t save toll free numbers for future use. I used Sovereign Bank for over 10 years and any time I needed to contact them I searched for the number online. I could have called a different number dozens of times and chances are I wouldn’t have ever noticed.

    I would say that the main problem with measuring the success of a PPC campaign by asking the caller how they found out about the company is that this information is not likely to flow back to PPC manager in a form that is useful for optimization (unless you were also to ask each caller which engine they used and what their specific query was). Even if I did learn that 50% of calls last week were generated from PPC efforts according to caller feedback, I can’t do much with this information because I don’t know which one of my campaigns/ad groups/keywords generated the calls. And if, like most PPC campaigns, cost is spread out unevenly across keywords and a few outliers are driving a great deal of cost without generating any leads, I’d never know it without call tracking. Cutting just a handful of keywords could drastically improve or damage my account but without call tracking its just guesswork.

  • Harvey Blom says:
    March 23, 2009 @ 5:00 am

    I have worked for the Yellow Pages in The Netherlands.

    Yellow pages use phone tracking in there directories both off line and online for our advertisers.

    I agree with Joanne for the most part on getting detailed information from the caller.

    A solutions is generate different numbers for different campaigns. So you can get more detailed information. At yellow pages we have a different number for the different advertisements and off line and online advertising.

    If Google analystics would track the guery, keyword and campaigne date that would be great.

    Asking additional questions to a customer is time consuming, yet very available. If it can be done automatic that would be beneficial.

    You may want to look if its possible for clients can keep their tracking toll free number or keep the redirection that would be great. A simply thing for your clients to do is to set up a own toll free number and ask the tracking company to track that, you will always be owner off the number.

    Sincerely yours. Harvey Blom (Harveyblom.com Launch June 2009)

  • Brian@ifbyphone says:
    July 14, 2009 @ 3:27 pm

    Great Article..in regards to the following:

    “..you may only need to run call tracking for 3 months to see the percentage of calls to online leads ratio and apply that as an estimate of online leads going forward, allowing you to drop the provider after a while.”

    I work for a company called Ifbyphone, and we provide hosted telephone applications including Google Analytics Integration and Call Tracking. We are beginning to see more and more companies offer monthly short term contracts to accommodate those companies who only want to use Call Tracking for a shorter amount of time. It works out well, for us specifically, so that customers can try out our features before signing those long term contracts.

    Call Tracking

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