Optimise PPC Performance & Deliver Showstopping Results

For marketing agencies that provide pay-per-click (PPC) advertising services, performance is everything. It’s how you demonstrate return on investment (ROI) to your clients. It’s the reason they stick with you instead of going to a competitor. And that retention is fundamental to the growth and continued success of your agency.

The trouble is, delivering, tracking, and demonstrating PPC performance isn’t always easy. PPC tracks direct engagement, but if an ad leads a customer to engage via another channel, such as a phone call, agencies often can’t attribute that to their efforts.

This challenge is amplified by a lack of access to accurate, real-time performance reporting. Without a complete and actionable view of PPC performance, many marketers are essentially powerless to improve it in meaningful ways.

Marketing agencies have tried numerous strategies and PPC insight tools to tackle those challenges. But most simply don’t solve that underlying issue of incomplete engagement and conversion visibility across channels.

However, there is one capability that does: call tracking. In this blog, we’ll explore three ways that call tracking can help marketing agencies continuously optimise PPC performance and deliver the kind of results that keep their clients coming back for more.

How call tracking can help you attribute conversions, simplify reporting, and optimise PPC performance

At first glance, you might not think that call tracking and PPC marketing go hand in hand. But, while it isn’t an obvious solution to the performance challenges PPC marketers face today, it is an incredibly powerful one.

Call tracking can help agencies improve PPC performance for their clients and deliver retention-driving results for their clients in three key ways:

1. Capture and attribute every conversion from your PPC campaigns

When you’re running PPC campaigns, clicks are far from the only measure of success. Seeing a PPC ad can drive a huge range of actions from customers. Some may research further online, eventually converting via another channel, while others may pick up the phone and continue their buying journey from there.

Because those conversions happen through other channels that aren’t directly linked to your PPC campaigns, it’s often very difficult to capture and attribute any resulting sales or engagements to specific PPC ads.

That’s where call tracking comes in. Whether conversions happen online or offline, call tracking can help you see exactly where the people calling you have come from.

Call tracking enables you to use a unique phone number for your PPC ads. So, when someone picks up the phone after seeing an ad on a search engine results page (SERP), you can tell they’ve come to you through PPC, and which of your ads and keywords drove that phone call.

You can even present each visitor to your clients’ website with a number that’s unique to them. So, when someone clicks through to a landing page from a PPC ad, the phone number acts like a cookie allowing you to see exactly where PPC fits into their cross-channel journey, and clearly prove the value of your PPC campaigns.

Receptional is a multi-award winning agency specialising in paid search advertising and SEO. Mediahawk call tracking enabled the team to drive a 5-fold increase in enquiries for one of their clients without any additional spend.

2. Learn which ads are working, then use your insight to improve PPC performance and client results

A 360-degree view of all conversions (including those coming from phone calls), gives you a true picture of PPC campaign performance.

At a glance, you can see which keywords and ads are driving conversions, and which aren’t.

What’s more, by importing your clients’ sales data into a call tracking platform like Mediahawk, you can both easily see the impact that your campaigns have on revenue and return on investment (ROI) too.

This helps you and your clients focus their budgets on the most impactful areas and refine their PPC strategy to maximise ROI.

“Part of our agency growth over the last four years, and why we partner with Mediahawk is the fact that we can actually prove beyond doubt the success of our campaigns. We can put monetary value against phone calls, and ultimately, we can optimise our campaigns a lot quicker, smarter, more efficiently.”
– Raife Wieland, Director and Founder, Promote Online

Colin Hudson, Head of Client Services at Mediahawk, explains, “Often, once they have a clear and complete view of PPC performance, marketers find that the ads they thought were having the right impact aren’t actually the ones they should be focusing on.

“Suddenly, they can see the difference between ads that drive lots of clicks but few conversions, and ones that drive fewer clicks but do lead customers to pick up the phone – the ads with real impact on their bottom line.”

3. Simplify and accelerate PPC performance reporting

Because call tracking pulls all that customer and performance data together in one place, it also makes it much easier for marketers to report back to their clients on campaign performance.

Intuitive dashboards enable marketers to report on data near-instantly and generate a clear, contextualised view of PPC performance for every stakeholder.

Instead of waiting for report and insight requests, teams can proactively reach out to clients to show them the great results their PPC ads are generating. Those reports can even be accompanied by recommendations to improve performance over time, or optimise spend to make limited budgets go further.

That shift in how you manage reporting can lead to a big change in your client relationships. You can quickly evolve from being a vendor or service provider, to being a true partner. And those partnerships drive long-term loyalty and customer lifetime value.

At Bamboo Nine, a data-driven approach to PPC performance optimisation enabled by call tracking helped the agency achieve a 98% client retention rate.

Summary

Call tracking helps PPC marketers clearly see the results their campaigns drive. That insight then enables them to do more of what’s working and continuously optimise campaigns to deliver showstopping client results and make limited budgets go further.

Mediahawk has helped numerous marketing agencies unlock the full potential of call tracking, and apply it to significantly increase PPC performance and delight their clients.

For a closer look at how call tracking can help you deliver exceptional PPC results for your clients, download your copy of our eBook: Call tracking and search marketing: The combination you didn’t think you needed.

Inside, you’ll discover exactly how you can harness the power of call tracking to better understand PPC performance, break down reporting silos, and ultimately, deliver the kind of results that enable long-term agency growth.