Avoid these 5 PPC Agency Headaches With Call Tracking

This is a contributed post from the experts at Linear, a PPC/CRO agency focused on helping clients grow.

Does your agency manage pay-per-call for its clients? Then you need to use a call tracking and analytics platform to prove and improve your results. In today’s mobile age, online forms aren’t the only leads your clients are getting anymore. The expected number of calls from smartphones to businesses are expected to reach 162 billion this year. That means a lot of phones are going to be ringing, and your clients will look to you to make more of those rings turn into bling.

You want to meet your client’s goals and make them more money, but sometimes it can feel like your client doesn’t believe you. When you can’t provide the data to back up your results, they have every right not to. It doesn’t have to be this way, as most of your pay-per-call client issues can be avoided with call tracking. Take a look below at the top five most common client complaints and how you can address them.

“We Didn’t Get Any Calls.”

If you’re a PPC agency that needs to drive calls to your customer, then this statement is particularly troubling. And all you can do is ask the client how they arrived at that answer.

If you don’t have a call tracking platform in place, the first question you have for your client may be, “are you sure?” After all, you know you’ve been running the ads correctly, and you know that there’s no way that they didn’t get a single call. However, this question can feel accusatory to the customer and you might end up with an escalation on your hands. Here’s how you can avoid this situation entirely by using a call tracking and analytics solution like Invoca.

In the ideal world, before you meet with your client, you’ll pop open your Invoca call report. Here you can see the number of inbound calls, call duration, dates, conversions, and more. Armed with this information, you can proactively review the call report with your client. You can share trends that you have observed and suggest optimization strategies to capitalize on high-value calls. This proactive approach makes you seem smarter, instantly shows your client the value that you are providing, and strengthens your relationships. And, of course, if they really aren’t getting any calls, you can figure out why and fix it!

“The Calls We Got Weren’t From Your Ads.”

Generally, you’ll hear this from a client who’s hoping to cancel. Maybe they think they’ll be better off saving that money they’re paying you. Or maybe they really don’t see your hand in the value of the calls they are getting.

Without call tracking, you might be stumped here. You also might even start to question if the calls are coming from your ads. There are a few things you can do here to resolve this issue or avoid it in the first place.

First, with call tracking, you can see exactly what ads the calls are coming from. This means you’ll have full confidence that calls coming from your ads are being properly attributed.

In Invoca, you can click the individual calls to check where they came from. They don’t just give you vague information either, you’ll see the marketing channel, the campaign, the UTM source, and even keywords. If your client is mistaken about where their calls are coming from, you’ll be able to show them that they are indeed originating from your ads.

Secondly, if you’re seeing fewer calls from your ads than you’d like, there’s a solution. With call tracking, you’ll be able to see where the calls are coming from. More specifically, you’ll be able to see the keywords and campaigns that are triggering the call. You can also see (by using Invoca Signal AI) which calls are are converting and which are not. With this data, you can tell where you’ll need to optimize.

Lastly, don’t forget to discuss the sales funnel with your client. Ads aren’t always meant to get a sale right away. You need to guide your potential customers down the funnel with brand awareness, low-threat leads, etc. The call that converts is in the final stages of the funnel. Therefore, you can show that all your ads serve a purpose and are contributing to revenue.

“All the Calls You Got Us Sucked.”

Hopefully your client doesn’t actually word their complaint this way, but it happens. Regardless, if they feel their calls are of poor quality, then some changes need to be made.

There are multiple reasons why you’re getting the wrong kind of calls. Maybe there were spam calls, maybe there were poor lead quality calls, or maybe your client’s sales team just wasn’t able to close the deal. In the old days before call tracking, there wasn’t really a way to see why the calls were bad. And if you’re not using call tracking, then you still might not be able to tell why your customer thinks the calls suck.

After all, just taking their word for the poor quality phone calls isn’t enough. Your customer might not be able to tell you why they didn’t like the calls; most likely, they’ll want to have you fix it for them with minimal effort on their part. Isn’t that why they’re paying you?

With some call tracking services, you’ll at least have the ability to manually listen to the calls. You can spend your time reviewing call after call, taking notes, and determining what might be causing the poor quality.

In an ideal world, you’ll use Invoca, and your life will be much, much easier. You’ll have access to so much information on the calls. You’ll see caller IDs, customer journey data, and you can see where the call came from, and call conversion data as well.

Invoca will track and label calls for you with the channel information, campaign information, and even the keywords. This can help you quickly and easily determine if you have a poor channel and help you identify any negative trends that may be caused by your campaigns.

“Why Did You Stop Bidding on That Keyword?”

Some clients will inevitably question every decision you make and they’re constantly watching what you do. While you, as the PPC expert, are confident in your choices, explanations can be tough at times.

If you stop bidding on a keyword, chances are, you have a good reason. Let’s say your customer has been watching their account and asks, “Why did you stop bidding on that keyword…” but they follow up with, “It was getting a ton of phone calls!”

If that’s the case, you might need to double check why you turned off that keyword. Without call tracking data, you will struggle to show your client the reasons behind your decision. Especially if that keyword was indeed getting a solid number of calls.

With normal call tracking, you may have spent some time listening to the calls and deciding that some keywords were bringing in poor quality calls. You might download some key calls, send them to your client, and expect them to listen to the calls themselves. From there, they would need to draw their own conclusion that you were right in your decision.

Again, Invoca makes this a lot easier. It tracks both the customer’s journey leading up to the call as well as the events that occurred on the call. You can use this information together to make decisions on how calls from certain paths will go. And if there’s a clear pattern of poor quality from a keyword—well, that’s why you’re not bidding on it anymore.

“We Have a Great Sales Team, so This is Your Fault.”

Even if this is true, you’re in this together with your customer. They want to make more money, and you need to help them do it.

Sometimes the keywords and channels are the weakest links, and sometimes their sales team isn’t performing the way it should. But you don’t want to jump to conclusions. Instead of arguing with your customer, let’s see how call tracking can help everyone win.

One of the greatest things about Invoca is their use of AI. Instead of spending your time listening to each and every call to disposition them, Signal AI can do it for you. Just a bit of training the algorithm (pre-trained AI models are also available for key industries) will teach your AI how to label calls.

Once you’re set up, you can choose from a selection of keywords or phrases that it needs to listen for. These are called signals. When the AI identifies a signal, it will note that in the call’s information. The signals you set up can either be types of services being discussed, keywords for new or existing customers, phrases indicating a sale, quote or appointment, and more.

When Signal AI records a conversion, you can easily track the types of calls that are coming in. You can see where those calls are coming from, and you can quickly determine their quality. You’ll be able to fairly judge if the sales team even had a chance to close the leads, or you can see if they kept missing the close.

Either way, you and your client can work together with this information to optimize both ends of the process for the best results.

A Final Tip For PPC Agencies

“Knowledge is power,” said Sir Francis Bacon. He couldn’t be more right. Today’s technological world relies more and more on data and numbers. As a PPC Agency, your livelihood depends on making sure you can prove to your customers that you’re making them money.

If you don’t have the numbers to back up your results, your client might start to attribute their success to anything else but you. Even worse, they could decide that they can do just fine without you. Now, that’s certainly the worst-case scenario, but we can’t stress enough the power of having data.

After all, we track every aspect of other conversions like the ones that happen online; we analyze that information to death. Then we use that information to continually improve results. Why wouldn’t you do the same with your phone calls?

Point being, if you’re a PPC Agency that’s not using call tracking, you’re missing out on some pretty heavy duty power.