Find Out Your ROI with Call Tracking
February 08, 2011
Have you ever dropped a ton of cash on a billboard or radio ad and then wondered if there was any affect? Do you have an expensive print ad that you are locked into for a yearly contract? What about a one-time mailer that went out to 5,000 prospective customers? If you want to know where your advertising dollars are making a return on your investment, get a call tracking number. It’s easy and inexpensive in relation to your overall advertising costs.
A call tracking number in tandem with specialized landing pages on your website can let you know how much activity your ad is producing. Call tracking can also give you valuable information about your audience. What time of day are you getting the most calls from a specific ad? Is there a particular day where your calls go unanswered? What zip code are most of your calls coming from and are those calls leading to sales? This information can tell you when to put more staff on the phone to make sure those calls are being answered. Call tracking can also let you know where to target your print advertising. For example, if you have more callers coming from a particular zip code, you could send out some secondary marketing material to that zip code to increase your call rate. You can even see the name, address and phone number of nearly every person who calls.
When integrating call tracking with online advertising, you can really drill down into the data. For example, call tracking tied into a PPC marketing campaign can let you know which keyword or ad group someone is calling from through dynamic phone number replacement. This means that the phone number on your website would automatically change to a particular call tracking line depending on how the visitor got to your site. If Ad X brings in a customer, they see one phone number. If Ad Y brought in a second customer, that person would see a different phone number. Since each number is associated with a specific paid ad and is being tracked separately, you can get valuable insight into the effectiveness of your ads.
This type of conversion tracking is very effective, even for websites that do not sell products through an e-commerce solution. For some businesses, this is the primary way of measuring ROI from all sources of advertising.
No matter what kind of campaign you start, be it online or traditional, tracking your results is important. If you plan ahead and track the data, then when you make your next marketing budget you will know where to put your money for maximum results. Our call tracking program was able to save a client $18,000 in print advertising that had no results. That’s quite a bit that is now free to put into a different publication, pay per click advertising, social media, or any number of alternate advertising forms.
