Attributing conversions to specific marketing channels and users is key to establishing a successful digital advertising campaign, no matter what industry you’re in. Doing this for online conversions such as a form submission or an online purchase is quite simple. However, tracking an offline conversion (a phone call, for example) can be very difficult – especially if most of these calls are coming directly from your website.
The senior living industry is a great example. A person looking for a new home for a loved one or someone looking to move into a new community may fill out a form to book an appointment. However, choosing someone’s senior care is an important decision, and it is highly likely that the person making this decision will pick up the phone to get more information. This typically occurs because the person researching senior living homes is doing so on behalf of another person and they may not live in close proximity to the community. Another reason that a visitor would likely call is due to many questions they would like answered prior to arranging an on-site visit. Think about any industry where the purchase being made needs to be considered and options weighed – people have questions and they want to talk.
The high likelihood of making a phone call, combined with the fact that the visitor arrived onto the website prior to the call, creates a giant black hole in marketers’ attribution data. Without call tracking technology, a marketer has no way of attributing that offline call from the website to the digital channel, campaign, and keyword that drove the call.
The absence of this data creates another daunting problem: “How do I even begin to track these conversions when I have no idea as to how many people are calling, what sources drive the most calls, and which keywords drive more offline and total conversions than others?” This issue is compounded dramatically for many organizations that have a wide network of locations across the country.
Below are a few tips to help begin and plan your call tracking strategy:
1) Start Small and Broad
The first step involves getting a sense of how many calls you are receiving from the website. If you only have a small volume of calls coming from your website, you may not need to get more granular information or implement a more advanced call tracking strategy. In this stage, use call tracking technology to dynamically display a single phone number to a visitor no matter what marketing source they come from. If you have multiple locations, gather a group (preferably in larger metropolitan areas) for this test.
2) Source-Level Tracking
Once you’ve established that there is a significant level of call volume coming from the website, you can begin to track calls at a more granular level. Utilizing some combination of referring domains, URL tags, and landing pages, as well as unique phone numbers tied to each channel, you can begin to determine which sources are driving more calls than others.
You may also choose to limit source tracking to only those channels you value most (for example, paid search). If you have multiple locations, you can decide whether you would like to expand the original group of locations to this new level of tracking and/or expand call tracking to the remaining locations that did not participate in the original group.
3) User-Level Tracking
The most granular type of call tracking, user-level tracking, allows marketers to attribute the keywords and ad copy that drive visitors to the site to offline phone call conversions. Each visitor to the website will have a unique phone number displayed to them during their visit. For businesses with multiple locations, this methodology allows you to track which keywords, ad copy, and sources drive the most calls to each individual location, thus providing the most granular call attribution data available.
Due to the granularity of this type of call tracking, it is very important to use a vendor that is extremely efficient in the usage of phone numbers. DialogTech’s heartbeat technology monitors visitor activity on the website and allows us to easily determine when phone numbers are and are not needed. This efficient use of phone numbers results in our customers requiring less numbers to track at a user level than any other call tracking provider. The result of this efficiency is a large cost savings from requiring less phone numbers.
To learn more about call attribution and conversion solutions, sign up for a DialogTech demo today.
