Call Tracking, the holy grail of PPC Management

At Maple Forest, we have a healthy mix of two kinds of clients, e-commerce clients and what we call “service providers”.

E-commerce clients tend to have highly complex campaigns, but tracking is comparatively easy.  After all, it’s simple to measure a sale and register a conversion from PPC campaigns with any number of analytics and tracking tools – including AdWords’ own.

Service providers are a different story.  We define service provider clients as clients who are looking for their PPC channel to generate leads for their business, rather than direct sales.  Part of running a lead generation means, usually, that the main call to action on a client’s website is a phone call.  Put simply, service providers usually want prospects to pick up the phone and call them.

This has traditionally presented a problem for PPC management – how can you attribute a phone call to an AdWords or Bing campaign?

In the UK, we’re lucky to have an answer.  Maple Forest uses a combination of leading UK call tracking technology to measure calls and attribute them back to the keyword, ad, ad group and campaign that generated it.

In practice, the system is quite simple.  A small piece of javascript is installed on each page, similar to Google Analytics.  Each instance of the phone number on a client’s site is wrapped with a bit of custom html which will swap out the phone number for each visitor, displaying a special, individually tracked number for each and every user session.

The effect of tracking calls is profound – inefficiencies in campaigns get laid bare. It becomes possible to see where every penny of spend goes and how many calls have been generated.  Most importantly, it allows us to track – to the penny – exactly what the cost of each lead is, regardless of its source.

The savvy marketers among you should be salivating at this point. We sure were when we started testing several months ago.  The PPC call tracking suite has become a highly important part of our Risk Free PPC billing system.

Three things you can do to get your site ready for accurate call tracking:

• Ensure that your phone number is displayed as text, rather than as an image
• Make your phone number clear – very clear – at the top of your pages and elsewhere in your navigation, footers and content as appropriate
• Implement multiple conversion channels, including online contact forms, live chat and call-me-back buttons for customers who might not be able to call right away