B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

Who’s calling? Very likely, it’s a respondent to your PPC ad

November 20th, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Ever wonder whether some of your PPC responses happen offline (usually by phone), rather than via the usual click-through …perhaps days after the ad was viewed?

We here at eMagine were curious about this in our own Web marketing, so we did a little study.  We were astonished to discover that more than 60% of our ad responses came by call-in, not click-through.  Put another way:  the true ROI of our PPC campaign was more than twice as strong as we had thought up until then. On digging around a bit, we learned that research by comScore indicates that 63 percent of searchers advance or complete their purchase offline following their search activity.

We’re not sure what fraction of our clients – or B2Bs at large – is similarly undervaluing their PPC marketing, but we’ll bet it’s fairly substantial.  Perhaps you know who you are …or, more’s the pity, perhaps you don’t.  Either way, there’s good news for all of you.

Call, and you shall be tracked
Several vendors now offer technology that enables you to capture offline (i.e., phone) responses to your online ads.  They include…

ClickPath – an award-winning ad tracking solution that tracks all conversions generated from your online advertising – including phone calls – and ties them back to the exact keyword or ad source.  At the heart of ClickPath is Dynamic Number Insertion technology that links call data to the originating keywords.  It assigns a unique toll-free number to every ad campaign you want to track, and places a simple code on your website which will follow respondents throughout their navigation of your site.  When visitors call the toll-free number, ClickPath captures that call data and matches it to the ad source, keywords, and referring domain.

Mongoose Metrics – a phone call tracking service that allows you to measure offline phone call tracking from within any web analytics package that supports on-page tagging.  You simply request the phone number(s) for your campaign from Mongoose and associate them with a hidden web page that the service will visit when the phone number is called.  It supports customized URL parameters to allow for further tagging phone call activity according to medium, campaign, keywords and more.

You need this capability …now
Unless you’re already doing it, you need to be tracking call-ins as well as click-throughs.  Aside from the ROI issue, there are other distortions from looking only at click traffic:

• You’re probably not getting an accurate picture of the differential value of various ad creatives, or the real value of certain keywords/phrases.  To think you are is to simply assume that callers follow exactly the same distribution as clickers, and that’s a bit of a stretch.
• You may be missing an opportunity to steer your traffic toward calling vs. clicking, where the more time-consuming act of calling – plus its interactivity – surely indicates a greater level of interest than an anonymous click.

You’ll probably have little difficulty choosing one of the available call tracking solutions and putting it to work, and your Web marketing consultants can surely help with any rough spots.  Once you get it done, you may well kick yourself for all that time you went without this data.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Internet Marketing, PPC