How to Leverage Call Tracking to Make PPC More Effective

70% of mobile users looking for goods and services online press the call button first. That's why calls are an important indicator to show the effectiveness of your advertising.

Google Analytics doesn't show the call statistics. Call-tracking services can remedy these analytics gaps.

Call tracking is a technology that helps determine which advertising sources generate calls to your company.

In plain English, it's a special webpage code (script) that shows site visitors different phone numbers to call, depending on how they came to the site or other user attributes.

At first, let's consider the kinds of call tracking.

In classical (source-based) call tracking, a number is assigned to a certain visitor source, for example, Google Adwords, a billboard, and so on. Classical call tracking provides less insight into your call data than other methods do.

Dynamic (visitor-session-based) call tracking displays a dedicated phone number for each site visitor.

We recommend using the last one because it gives you detailed information on call-generating ad sources and even keywords that brought the customers to your website. So that you can track how many calls the particular keyword brought you. You can find this information in the call log. Here's how it looks.

That's pretty simple. You need to check the reports in the interface of the call tracking service and GA as well. The more targeted calls your company gets for less money, the more efficient your advertising campaign is.

Sometimes every company receives mistaken and spam calls. That's why the analytics of all calls is pointless. There's no universal value for the perfect call length as every kind of business has its own perfect value.

So you can manually set it up in a call tracking service in order to get reports on targeted calls.

Well, firstly let me congratulate you.

Then you need to optimize it to get more calls and sales in the future:

• Expand the list of keywords according to similar search queries;

• Improve ad positions (improve ad relevance and raise keyword bids);

• Expand the audience to reach more potential customers;

• Boost the budget of this particular ad campaign.
  

Look before you leap, as they say. At first, you should clarify why you got only a few calls.

Analyze customers' online behavior (how much time they spent on your website, etc). Thus, you'll understand if you reached your target audience or not.

It's likely users who come through this advertising campaign make other targeted activities. They may not call, but instead sign up or make orders online.

Also, it's important to consider the specifics of your business. Let's say you spent 500 dollars on your campaign. The results of it were 1000 clicks and 3 targeted calls leading to the sale. Do you think this campaign is effective or not?

Certainly, it depends on your business area. If you're selling apartments, your campaign is certainly successful, but if you're selling stationery, it's not. Weigh all the pros and cons before you take the decision to disable your PPC campaign.

Sure! Take these actions:

• learn the search queries bringing the users to your website. If they aren't targeted, add them to negative keywords and exclude from your campaigns.

• pay attention at the ad positions. If they're low, try to improve them.

• analyze the ad. Is your offer clear enough? Does it correspond to the users' requests?
  

However, if your ad campaign is properly optimized, but your sales don't grow, the best solution is to disable it and not waste your money on an ineffective advertisement.

Call tracking lets you identify mistakes when customizing PPC. Let's say the advertising campaign generates calls from customers who mostly want to clarify the price of your product and aren't likely to purchase it. It looks like you specified the wrong price in your ad campaign. The same things happen when customers try to order something that you don't actually sell.

Only fortune-teller precisely knows the future.

In all seriousness, the evaluation of the advertising efficiency is possible when you have enough clicks for analytics. For example, you got 1 click and 1 targeted call from your ad campaign. What's your opinion here, is it efficient or not? Probably yes. But, it can be a bit of random luck.

In this case, A/B testing is a great way to determine which advertising is more effective. For instance, you have 2 ad banners and want to choose the best one. Try to use the same targeting settings, but different ads. After data collection, it's pretty easy to make the decision. The more calls the ad banner generates, the more efficient it is.

Because call tracking helps you distribute your marketing budget in favor of the most profitable advertising channels. This service lets you choose the cheapest way to promote your product.

For instance, Ringostat empowered online store Lets.kz to learn their call-generating channels and keywords. They clarified that cheaper low-frequence requests bring more calls than general ones.

Therefore, the online store changed the general requests in their advertising campaign to low-frequency ones. This way, Lets.kz increased the number of calls from PPC by 48%.

Analyzing the call statistics, you can determine the time of pointless and untargeted clicks from PPC and turn off ad impressions at that time. Conversely, you can find out the day of the week and time of day when customers call more often.

According to the received results, you can increase your ad impressions during the peak hours. In the end, you'll exclude worthless advertising and save your money.

Set up the callback widget on your website. Your website visitors are probably annoyed by long wait times for a response or aren't prepared to spend money on the call. The callback widget is like a good sales consultant offering to help when the customer hesitates.

Website visitors make only one click and get the answers to their questions about the product or service. For example, thanks to the callback widget, our client, plastic window manufacturer Perfect, boosted the number of targeted calls by 48%. Incidentally, the callback widget is free for Ringostat clients.

Of course not. If you don't receive calls from your clients or don't advertise, there's no need to use a call tracking service. Also, the size of the advertising budget matters.

That's why we encourage you to use our online calculator. Thanks to this, you can calculate if it's profitable for you to implement a call-tracking service.

At first glance, you'll save a little money. Nevertheless, you'll continue to waste part of your budget on ineffective advertising. You'll lose the opportunity to improve your PPC campaigns and boost sales.

Action steps for improving the effectiveness of PPC: