The Benefits of Call Tracking

Call Tracking is a great innovation and we always encourage our clients to use it on their website. But, if you are a small business, why would you want to incur yet another business expense? The answer is that it should easily pay for itself.

The Purpose of Call Tracking

Let’s start with what it is not for. It is not a bit of kit enabling your AdWords Agency to pat himself on the back (well it shouldn’t be anyway!). It’s actually about increasing your profit. Suppose in a very simplistic example, that you are spending £25 per day on 10 ad groups that eventually yields £50 revenue. If all 10 ad groups are generating clicks and we have no conversion data, then you might think it wise to continue running all 10 ad groups. But let’s now suppose that some newly acquired conversion data reveals that 5 of those ad groups do not generate any conversions at all. So spending £25 on the 5 profitable ad groups might double the number of clicks and double the revenue to £100. So far so good. Now you might want to double your budget to £50 per day and pull in £200 revenue. In fact, at this stage you might not want to set a daily budget because every £1 on advertising yields much more than £1 revenue. The outcome might be that you set a £100 daily budget and never actually spend that amount on the 5 good ad groups. That is how it should be.

How Does It Work

So what role does call tracking play? It’s actually a part of your conversion data. It’s actually clever enough to know which campaign, ad group, ad (and even keyword) led to the call from Mrs Smith at Braintree. The reason is that when Mrs smith clicks to your website from AdWords she sees a unique telephone number (if she she clicked from another part of AdWords or Facebook, she would see another number). Mrs Smith doesn’t know any different. She just sees and dials a number on your website which actually gets diverted to your real number – and triggers the conversion data in AdWords via Google Analytics. It will also work whatever the source of the online marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn, Organic SEO, Email Marketing etc) so it’s a useful for tool for comparing effectiveness across different campaigns, not just within AdWords.

Call tracking is therefore useful for any company spending budget on online marketing and receiving a significant proportion of direct sales/enquiry calls from the website. If most of your customers use online contact forms or direct e-commerce facilities, call tracking is obviously less important.

Options For Installing Call Tracking

Google AdWords now offers this service free of charge. Click this link for more details. The bad news is that it is technically difficult to implement and only available for 0800 numbers. We do not recommend the use of 0800 numbers for small businesses, because potentially it can deter a high number of customers (the mobile call rates are high and sometimes 0800 numbers are perceived as being behind a national chain when in fact the customer is looking for a local supplier). So for the time being, we recommend using call tracking for local geographical numbers – and there are many call tracking companies that can provide low cost solutions.

We have found for example that www.calltracks.com provides a particularly good low cost service for small business. Implementation is surprisingly easily. You will need to imbed a short line of code on each page of the website where your telephone number appears and if you are working with Click Republic (or another agency), we will integrate it with Google Analytics and AdWords. It’s as simple as that.