A good friend of mine has built a nice business for himself and he has been expanding his paid search marketing aggressively. So one of the issues he has, like many other PPC marketers have, is how you can track your PPC campaigns as thorough as possible.
So let talk facts – a good landing page will converts at 5 – 20% depending on keywords bid on. So that leaves your bounce rate (the rate a visitor hits your page and leaves without doing any other interaction) at around 80-95%. Or does it? We also know not everybody wants to leave their information on a computer floating around in cyberspace and still likes to talk to a “real” person so your landing page should have a three ways of communication available for a visitor to interact with you (email, form, phone).
The technology is called call tracking and basically uses unique phone numbers to help you better understand which campaign drive sales or inquiries. We are going to talk about PPC phone call tracking and the key benefits of PPC phone call tracking include the clients’ ability to understand what keywords result in offline phone call activity as well as understanding the full ROI of the paid search campaign. These insights help marketing executives to streamline data, increase ROI, and outperform competitors.
Here are some good sources I like:
- Mongoose Metrics – Mongoose Metrics offers two product solutions for PPC phone call tracking: AccuTrack 1:1 and AccuTrack Session. AccuTrack 1:1 allows PPC managers a simple and cost effective means of tracking PPC clicks at either the campaign, ad group or keyword level. Because AccuTrack 1:1 requires a one to one assignment, AccuTrack Session is ideal for PPC campaigns with a higher volume of keywords.
- ClickPath – I like ClickPath because it uses a simple client side JavaScript code which loads from your web pages directly into a visitor’s PC and communicates with the ClickPath service. ClickPath requires no server-side programming and software installation. What I also like is that it will not hurt any search engine optimization efforts you have or any other SEO tracking.
- TeleCapture charges you by the total number of phone numbers you want, the services you want on each phone number, and then per-minute fees. You can start for $5.99 a month for one phone number, and pay $0.065 a minute for people who use that number. They have a handy feature called “Call Announce” that plays a brief, pre-recorded message to the operator describing where the call came from. They have many announcement recordings, including Internet, television, Google, eBay, and door hanger. This way, the person who answers the call can jot down where the call came from. Also the reporting is shown by hour, day, and month. It also shows calls-per-caller and minutes-per-call. You can also e-mail call information to other people, and have your reports e-mailed to you on a pre-determined basis.
So which one to choose? If you are looking to just start out with this type of tracking I would suggest TeleCapture as you can do this very cost effectively. I like Mongoose Metrics if you have a over 15,000 keywords in your PPC campaign. Now if you are a big SEO person or your business model is very dependent on your organic rankings I would suggest ClickPath with its easy use and limited code that is placed on your pages.
So give it a PPC call tracking a shot and see if it works for you.
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