How MHA used Mediahawk call tracking to improve their targeting and increase care home enquiries

Guest blog by Ashley Toon, Digital Marketing Manager at Methodist Homes (MHA)

As the primary mode of communication, telephone calls account for 70 – 80% of the total of care placement enquiries we receive at MHA. However, we faced challenges with our previous call tracking capabilities, which were limited and made it difficult to assess the effectiveness of our marketing budget.

As a charity, it’s even more important that we are accountable for our budgets. We must ensure that marketing spend is used as efficiently as possible to achieve success. MHA wants to make its ad spend go as far as it possibly can, ensuring we maximise our ability to reach those in need of our incredible services.

The need for a better solution

Before transitioning to Mediahawk, we had a basic call tracking system in place using static numbers. However, it lacked advanced features such as dynamic telephone numbers, speech analytics, and integration with Google Analytics (GA4). These limitations meant we couldn’t fully understand the impact of our marketing activities or optimise future campaigns effectively.

We recognised the need for a more robust solution and decided to implement Mediahawk to improve our call tracking and marketing analytics capabilities.

Our case study outlines the benefits we’ve experienced since making the switch – including how we reduced our cost per acquisition (CPA) on our Google Performance Max (Pmax) campaigns by 32% – and how Mediahawk has significantly improved our marketing insights and overall performance.

Benefits of moving to Mediahawk

The move to Mediahawk has delivered several key benefits that have strengthened our marketing insights, improved campaign performance, and streamlined reporting. Below are some of the most impactful improvements we’ve seen:

1. Comprehensive data

Combining call data with web form enquiries (attributed in GA4) provides us with a holistic view of the customer journey and accurate lead volume assessment in a single platform.

2. Marketing attribution

Inbound phone calls can now be attributed to specific marketing activities, helping us understand their role in the overall customer journey and demonstrating return on ad spend (ROAS)

3. PPC insights

Identifying which keywords drive calls allows us to refine our pay-per-click (PPC) strategy, improve performance, and reduce wasted ad spend.

4. Audience profiling

By sharing our first party data from Mediahawk with Google Ads’ algorithm, we can better target potential care seekers, focusing on those who select option 1 (care enquiry) on the interactive voice response (IVR) system, leading to more relevant leads

5. Speech Analytics

Call analysis at both an individual and aggregate level helps us identify trends, understand enquiry types, and improve the customer experience.

6. Dynamic call tracking

Implementing dynamic telephone numbers on our website enables us to map the entire customer journey, from initial engagement with marketing campaigns to the final conversions, and beyond.

7. Sector experience

Working with a call tracking provider that specialises in the care home sector has been invaluable, particularly for benchmarking performance against industry standards. The team of experts at Mediahawk understands the unique challenges of care home marketing, providing deep industry insights and tailored support to help care providers optimise their campaigns and maximise results.

Implementing Mediahawk has significantly improved our marketing insights and overall performance. The integration with Google has allowed us to pass data seamlessly, leading to stronger audience targeting, higher-quality leads, and a more efficient use of our PPC ad spend.

Operational reporting enhancements

We recently integrated Mediahawk with our Power BI operational dashboard, enabling us to match telephone enquiries to sales.

Power BI was already integrated with GA4 to track webform enquiries, so we now have complete attribution of all inbound enquiries in one place.

Additionally, as Power BI links with our CRM, we can follow the entire customer journey – from initial enquiry to move-in. This allows us to accurately measure ROI and optimise our marketing spend more effectively.

Speech Analytics trial

Our recent trial of Speech Analytics has provided valuable insights into key customer queries, behaviours, and interests. The AI capabilities of Speech Analytics has deepened our understanding of care seekers’ needs and supported our ongoing learning.

Looking ahead, we see Speech Analytics playing an essential role in measuring campaign success and prioritising marketing efforts for specific care homes.

Conclusion

Implementing Mediahawk has transformed our approach to marketing measurement and performance. By gaining deeper insights into customer behaviour, optimising our PPC strategy, and improving attribution across channels, we’ve achieved stronger audience targeting, higher-quality leads, and more efficient use of our marketing budget.

As a charity, this has been crucial in ensuring our budget goes further, allowing us to reach more people in need of our services. As we continue to expand our use of Speech Analytics, we are confident it will further enhance our understanding of care seeker needs and support our commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences.