The following guest post was authored by Jillian Zacchia, Content Generation Specialist at Acquisio.
With the death of the flip phone and the massive smartphone takeover, users began to shift away from desktop search in favor of a more practical and local search solution – mobile. Since then, mobile search ad spend has increased, year after year, as marketers hope to turn the hoard of mobile users and searchers into a surge of new conversions and clients.
Almost a decade after the rise of smartphones and the introduction of mobile search, marketers are still struggling to turn mobile users into conversions. But one of the ways local agencies are seeing positive results in terms of mobile conversions is with call tracking.
A recent study by iAcquire and SurveyMonkey found that 70% of mobile searches lead to action within an hour, and that action is often a phone call.
In fact, Google reports that 61% of local searches result in a call.
Clearly there is a lot of success and a lot to of potential coming from mobile search, and call tracking seems essential in order to learn from and optimize search ads where phone numbers are present. But is your company maximizing its call tracking potential?
Intro to call tracking
Marketers are in search of call tracking vendors that provide superior data collection, but these search professionals may be looking in the wrong place.
Of course there are call tracking vendors that are superior to others, those that offer keyword level call tracking, call scoring, location targeting, and A/B testing options like IfByPhone rank above the rest, but reporting and tracking are not enough for such an important local search ad metric.
Integration
A call tracking solution that Integrates with a search marketing software, like Acquisio, will allow search marketers to understand, prove and improve ROI from calls, and that analysis and integration of data is how a small local business will generate more calls.
For example, DialogTech tracks the search ad calls and creates extensive reports that contain everything from keyword data to recorded calls to sales generated from calls. Then Acquisio translates that data into an easy to read, interactive report that is accessible through the Acquisio dashboard.
In plain English, DialogTech records the call lead and Acquisio includes that recording in regular reports with an interactive click to listen function.
The best part is, this partnership between IfByPhone and Acquisio allows users to see their call tracking information alongside their social, display and search and reports, so it’s easy to draw connections between campaigns and make changes and improvements all in one place.
This aggregation of information and these up to date reports are generated automatically and are available with customizable features and easy to read graphs, charts and tables.
But why do flashy reports matter when you want to generate more calls? Because the presentation of call tracking information must be easy to read and easy to modify in order for marketers to improve ROI. IfByPhone and Acquisio work together to present the call tracking information, making it clear which keywords and campaigns are generating calls and sales.
Without this integration, call tracking data would be more difficult to read and make sense of. Thousands of keywords and countless call details for each campaign, presented as raw data, would likely be overwhelming and time consuming for search marketers to handle.
Optimization
Automated reports help highlight key features of call tracking campaigns so improvements can be made, but there is also a way to make all those campaign and keyword improvements automatically. With the Acquisio partnership, the search marketing software offers a bid and budget management feature which automatically makes changes to campaign bids and budgets.
You still get all the information and can use it to creatively improve ROI, but the software’s algorithms do all the basic and monotonous bid and budget changes to keywords and campaigns for you. Utilizing a system that updates every 30 minutes to account for any changes that are happening in the auction throughout the day, BBM allows marketers to set bids that garner the most conversions for the lowest cost.
It’s the ultimate way to maximize call tracking potential.
Increase calls/conversions by more than 50%
When a well-known insurance company wanted to increase conversions (recorded as calls or quotes), within 24 hours of using BBM the account saw a noticeable decrease in cost per conversions and a dramatic increase in conversions. Before using BBM the company amassed a total of 896 conversions in two months. After BBM was added to the campaigns to make automatic bid adjustments, the insurance company made 1,496 conversions in two months – that’s an increase of 64%.
If you’re hoping to hear the phone ring more often, Acquisio’s BBM can help drive traffic to your call tracking ads and IfByPhone can help translate that traffic into readable data to help make campaign improvements.
Local mobile search is only getter bigger, if you want to maximize your call tracking potential there’s no easier way than with the DialogTech and Acquisio duo.
Jillian Zacchia is the Content Generation Specialist at Acquisio. She is a professional writer, editor and social media procrastinator with a degree in Literature and Communications from McGill. She started her journalism career writing about lifestyle and entertainment, and after dabbling with wedding and travel writing she began the transition towards content creation for start-ups, marketing, tech and software companies.