Marketers put a lot of faith in data. It seems like marketing decisions are hardly ever made anymore without first consulting the data. Have a new display ad that you want to run? Better check the data. Want to sponsor that popular trade show again? Check the data. Increasing your mobile ad budget? Check the data. Making data-driven decisions takes some of the guesswork out of marketing. But what if your data is wrong? What if you have been making all of these crucial decisions based on incomplete data? This nightmare is all too real for marketers that aren’t capturing data from phone calls – and they don’t even know it.
You Can’t Afford to Ignore Calls
Thanks to the popularity of smartphones, the number of phone calls to businesses are skyrocketing and are set to reach 162 billion in 2019, according to analyst firm BIA/Kelsey. More people than ever are choosing to call a business instead of contacting them through a web form. The problem for many marketers is that they lack the ability to attribute phone calls back to their marketing source. This can be resolved with the addition of call attribution software to your technology stack. Call attribution fills the hole in your marketing data, allowing you to optimize your marketing for the campaigns which drive the most conversions and generate revenue for your business.
Optimize for All of Your Conversions
Conversions are what marketers want and conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a tried and true marketing practice. For a paid search ad designed to drive demo requests, clicks are important, but the outcome that marketers really care about is the completion of a demo request form. That ad is worthless unless it drives the conversion you want. Email clicks are great, but an email click that results in a request for more information is better.. But that conversion doesn’t always happen via form fill and, if you only measure web conversions, you’re likely missing or misattributing 49% of your conversions (DialogTech Insights). Without call analytics, your data is lying to you.
Optimizing for conversion rate without call attribution data causes marketers to make poor marketing decisions. With data that represents only half of your conversions you can’t optimize your budget for the best ones – it would be like planning a road trip with only half of a map. To make educated decisions you have to fill in your missing data. By including call data in your ad optimization, you can ensure your marketing campaigns drive the most conversions.
Marketing Attribution Data Without Holes
Lead generation is a fundamental marketing responsibility and primary measure of marketing success. Getting credit for leads generated from your marketing requires a rock-solid attribution strategy where every single lead can be captured and attributed to its proper source. Marketers have perfected attribution for web leads and can easily capture clicks, form fills, and the user data associated with these actions. With call attribution, marketers can track phone leads the same way they track clicks. Call attribution can give you more than just the source of the call, it can capture session-based data for every inbound call which allowing marketers to track web activity leading up to the call. This means you can understand the caller’s click path, referral source, and even search keywords for paid ads. With this level of tracking data, marketing can attribute both online leads and phone leads back to their campaigns with confidence.
Marketers can’t afford to make decisions based on inaccurate data. If you’re not tracking phone calls, that is exactly what you’re doing. When you’re unable to capture call conversions and attribute all marketing leads back to their source, you only see half the picture. To learn more about your missing data and how to fill this void, download our research report: The 49% ROI Mistake Marketers Don’t Know They’re Making.
