5 powerful ways to turbo-charge your PPC conversions

Category: Call tracking

Have your paid search results hit a dry spell? Maybe you’ve tried your usual tactics to get more traffic and conversions but nothing moves the needle? If so, it’s time to look beyond the clicks.

Before getting too despondent about last week’s PPC results, it’s worth stepping back and looking at the big picture around business communications.

In an increasingly digital world, it’s tempting to imagine that phone conversations are dying out. But, in reality, they remain a big part of the mix. In fact, researchers estimate that 169 billion smartphone calls will be made to businesses by 2020.

What’s more, conversions from mobile are significantly higher than desktop. And, with Search driving the most calls, a simple truth starts to become clear: Understanding the relationship between your ads, calls and conversions is critical if you want to boost your ROI.

With call tracking technology running alongside your ads, you’ll no longer be in the dark.

Make the change and it’s possible to boost your PPC conversions in five powerful ways:

1. Uncover the keywords that trigger high-intent inbound phone calls

With call tracking, you can see which keywords prompted people to pick up the phone.

Choosing the right keywords means understanding what your customers are looking for, and what stage of the buying cycle they’re at:

  • Short tail keywords (also known as a ‘head term’ or ‘generic term’), such as ‘insurance’, are usually used at the start of a search, but less likely to result in a quick conversion. Depending on your industry, these can also be very competitive and drain your budget quickly.
  • Long tail keywords are highly targeted and are much more likely to be used by someone who’s ready to buy.

“Gotta catch ’em all”?

You want to hook as many customers as possible, so it can be tempting to bid on every term related to your services or products. But this is where your costs can spiral out of control. Much better to invest time into finding the right long tail keywords.

Keyword level tracking will help you to find the answers. It connects inbound enquiries and sales directly to the ad campaigns and keywords that trigger them.

By bridging the gap between your ad spend and sales, you can identify exactly which keywords are bringing in the leads and sales. Then you can focus your budget on campaigns that deliver outstanding results – and stop wasting money on ads that your target audience ignores.

2. Analyse your inbound conversations to boost conversion rates

Calls are increasingly recognised as a crucial step in the sales process, so digging deeper into your inbound conversations will enable you to influence potential purchasers at key decision making stages.

This is where speech analytics fits in. Spotting keywords that are indicative of high value conversions enables you to instantly identify callers with a high intent to purchase. You can prioritise these calls within your sales team.

Automatically categorising and analysing calls based on keywords used by the caller allows you to improve your targeting. For instance, if you notice that your paid search campaigns are generating more calls to ‘Support’ rather than ‘Sales’, you can use the information to tweak those ads and drive more revenue-generating conversions.

3. Take advantage of key days and times for demand

Anyone who’s used eBay, knows that ending an auction for a big-ticket item you’re selling at 7am on a Monday morning is a terrible idea. Similarly, ad campaigns can be more or less effective at different times.

Data from your past campaigns gives you insight into when you should adjust your paid search budget to allow for peaks and troughs in enquiries – both online and offline.

Knowing when to expect a higher number of inbound enquiries, the peak times that you receive most calls, how long your calls last, and other insights, enables you to weight your budget to capture demand at the right time. This can lead to significant gains in traffic and conversions at a much lower cost.

4. Track and attribute all calls-to-action

It’s reckoned that a prospect engages with around six pieces of information before making the decision to purchase a product or service. These touch-points may include clicking on an advert, looking up customer reviews, having a live chat conversation, filling out a form, or calling you.

With call tracking added to your toolkit, you can analyse the full visitor journey. This gives you a better understanding of exactly which channels your prospects prefer to use to connect with you at each stage of the buying cycle.

It’s then much easier to see the role played by paid search in each interaction — so you can optimise your budget. For instance, you may decide that your retargeting campaign isn’t generating any leads, so you switch it off to save money. In contrast, another touch-point — that might have been considered insignificant — could turn out to be deeply integral to the buying cycle.

5. Optimise your landing pages

As any marketer knows, it’s vital to create landing pages that are consistent with your ad copy and messaging. But is this a ‘set and forget’ activity? Absolutely not!

When you test variations of your ads, do the same with your landing pages. It’s easy to run some A/B tests to see what page elements – even designs – convert better. This could include moving your call-to-action, changing button colours, using different images, even changing content. You’d be surprised at how small changes can impact your conversion rates dramatically.

Refine your marketing using performance data

It’s claimed that Google Ads can improve brand awareness by up to 80% and potentially generate £2 for every £1 spent.

However, squeezing the best results from your marketing budget is all about using data intelligently to shape your strategy.

True marketing success depends on ensuring that all your channels, from search, display, email, video, social media, chat – even offline – are in sync. With call tracking integrated into your ad campaigns, you can see how they each relate to each other and optimise your spend like never before.

About the author - Natalia Selby

Marketing Executive at Mediahawk, with 20 years experience in analytics and content management.

Man and woman using laptops.
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