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Due to the recent economic slowdown, many brands are now spending significantly less on advertising than they were planning to at the beginning of the year. With fewer dollars at their disposal, media planners, buyers, and agencies are taking a number of steps to adjust. Many are rebuilding their media plans from scratch, renegotiating everything that isn't committed, or even cutting entire channels.
Unless you're actually closed for business, you can't simply stop your marketing altogether. After all, businesses can't sell their products, pay their employees, or pay their suppliers without the demand that marketing creates. Much like that coupon-clipper holding up the line at the drugstore, we all must find ways to stretch our budgets. Fortunately, you can make your digital marketing more efficient with call tracking. This isn't as complicated as you might think and it's way less annoying than the coupons.
When times are tough, the need for accurate and timely marketing measurement becomes even more important. If a marketing program can't be explicitly tied to business impact, how can you be sure it's helping your KPIs? More importantly, how can your boss be sure that what you are doing is driving revenue?
Invoca helps businesses tie conversions and sales from inbound calls to the campaigns, ads, and search keywords that drove them through call tracking and conversational analytics. With Invoca, digital marketing leaders can stop the guesswork and see all of their online and offline conversions side-by-side, helping them eliminate waste and reduce acquisition costs. In fact, recent independent research found that Invoca helps customers optimize their paid search campaigns by 25%, enabling $1.4 million in annual savings.
Without call tracking, marketers can only guess how their digital campaigns are impacting their call-based sales. This usually results in a significant underestimation of their marketing-driven phone sales and artificially high measurement of cost per acquisition (CPA).
As you can see in the example below, in the “before” scenario when measuring online conversions only, the marketer understands their CPA to be $200 based on 50 total conversions. When they incorporate accurate call conversions — the “after” scenario — they get visibility into the additional 50 conversions that happened by phone, increasing their total conversions to 100 and revealing a true CPA of $100.
Through Invoca's Google Ads integration, marketers can create that sweet, sweet closed-loop attribution across all conversion types, tying them directly back to their PPC campaigns on a 1:1 consumer level. With accurate measurement, organizations finally achieve visibility into the actual business impact of their campaigns and understand their true CPA.
With visibility into their true CPA, digital marketers are equipped to begin identifying both high-performing and cost-effective tactics that can further reduce their acquisition costs.
For example, health insurance brokers eHealth struggled to achieve accurate attribution. Before implementing Invoca, they could, at best, get session-level attribution for calls originating from paid search or their website. “When our click-to-call ads converted, we had limited visibility into conversions at a meaningful level, making it extremely difficult to scale,” according to Will Guimont, VP of Analytics and Reporting. “When we implemented Invoca for these campaigns, we were able to drive down CPAs by upwards of 60%.”
Ad suppression is a key tool in the digital marketer's kit to eliminate wasted ad spend by ensuring that they aren't serving (and paying for) ads shown to existing or recently-acquired customers. However, this can become a challenge if those conversions are happening offline. By tracking all call conversions with Invoca and pushing this information into ad platforms like Google Marketing Platform, Skai, or Marin Software, marketers can automatically suppress ads to those who have already converted over the phone. This not only reduces wasted ad spend, it prevents you from annoying your new customers with irrelevant ads.
This one's a twofer. No one wants customers seeking support connecting to the sales department. Not only do the resulting call transfers create a negative customer experience, but it also causes longer-than-necessary hold times as sales agents are busy fielding support questions.
When the caller has a poor experience before they can even talk to anyone, conversion rates go down and that makes your marketing efforts less effective. But the right call tracking and analytics platform can address these issues. When calls go to the right agent the first time, conversion rates go up because you aren't starting with frustrated customers who've been rotting on hold for 15 minutes. Just like slow website loading times kill e-commerce sales, long average hold times kill phone sales.
With Invoca, the call center can retrieve real-time insights about a caller, including their previous engagement history as well as the keyword and ad campaign that drove the call. This data can be used to automatically route and filter calls so callers are sent to the person or department that can best help them without sending them through the phone tree. With this information in hand, call center reps can more efficiently and effectively work with the customer to make a sale. In fact, a recent study found that businesses that implemented Invoca realized 90% fewer calls transferred away from sales departments based on “more focused digital marketing targeting, and smarter marketing investment decisions.” This equates to a higher conversion rate and better use of your marketing resources.
We're all experiencing tightening ad budgets, so it's more important than ever to squeeze more value out of every penny spent on digital advertising. Invoca helps marketers reduce CPAs, eliminate wasted ad spend, and increase conversion rates from paid media. That means in lean times you can acquire more customers for less money, and when things are flush, you can reallocate your savings into your most successful campaigns.
To learn more about how Invoca call tracking and conversational analytics works, check out The Call Tracking Study Guide for Marketers.
