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It doesn't take a seasoned paid search veteran to know what the critical PPC metrics are. Things like click-through rate, cost per conversion, and position are all obvious metrics you look at regularly to see whether paid search is thriving or dying under your command.
What may be less obvious, yet as important, are call tracking metrics. Paid search is driving tons and tons of calls -- if you have doubts, let Google or eMarketer ease your mind. Without a doubt, it's time to get really cozy with call tracking metrics. It's that, or miscalculate ROI, make bad "optimizations," and fail to get credit for all of the conversions you're driving.
It seems like an easy choice so here are eight of the most important call tracking metrics real PPC experts need in their dashboard:
You’re already monitoring which keywords are leading to online purchases and lead form submissions. When you know which keywords are driving inbound sales calls, you can increase bids on successful keywords and avoid eliminating keywords that actually work great for generating offline conversions.
Track which ads and campaigns lead to phone calls so you have all the conversion data to test, and optimize your ad copy, headlines, and landing pages. For example, if you notice one of you ads for a campaign designed to drive phone calls is underperforming, you can tweak the copy to encourage more phone calls.
With the rise of mobile search, this metric could be a game-changer for your paid search strategy. If you know inbound calls come mostly from mobile, make your mobile audience a priority by increasing your bids for mobile users and using click to call links on ads and in landing pages.
An abundance of mobile callers could also mean it's time to try out Google's call only campaigns.
This metric gives you immense insight into your customers' behavior.
With the answers to these questions, you can decide if it’s better to use call extensions or call only campaigns, include phone numbers on your landing pages, or a combination of both.
Simple metric, huge benefit. The length of a call is one of the easiest ways to determine traffic quality.
If your ads are referring 10-second calls from people who are looking for customer support for a product you don't even have, you know you have some targeting and filtering to put in place. If another campaign is driving long calls from serious customers, it’s time to increase the spend.
Know where your best callers are geographically. If you find that most calls come from a specific region, you can improve targeting and set bid modifiers accordingly.
With the rise of remarketing, it’s more important than ever to understand how your prospects and customers have previously interacted with your brand. Just like you want to know if your online traffic visited your site without converting, it’s important to know if your inbound callers are new or repeat callers. Repeat callers may require a different and more personalized call treatment, or maybe for your business, new callers are more valuable because repeat calls tend to be customer service calls. Either way, this is an important metric for improving keyword targeting, the caller experience and more.
It's important to know when your paid search drives phone calls, but the next level is understanding what happens on those calls. You're wasting money driving phone calls if they never result in revenue.
With tools like Invoca, you can capture important moments on a phone call as well as the final outcome, whether it ended with a sale, an appointment, or a lost opportunity. This data will not only help you measure performance and ROI, it can be used in retargeting campaigns. If the caller didn't buy over the phone, hit them with a personalized retargeting ad based on their phone conversation!
People that choose to call are typically valuable customers you don’t want to ignore. Dig deeper and you’ll find those interactions are telling you A LOT about your paid search performance and untapped areas for growth.
If you want to learn more about bringing in-depth call tracking metrics to you paid search strategy, download the ebook, Paid Search for the Mobile Era.
