How to improve PPC performance and demonstrate your results with the right call tracking platform

Most agencies don’t have the tools required to track their calls properly. And to make matters even harder, many tools on the market today often lead marketers to attribute the wrong sources to their leads, having a major knock-on effect on how they optimise their campaigns.

When used effectively, call tracking is an ideal solution for any agency looking to understand, optimise, and demonstrate the impact of their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. As we established in our previous blog, it offers a way to clearly see the results your campaigns drive and gain the information you need to continuously improve their performance.

But to do it successfully, you need a platform that offers the accuracy and granularity to really understand your customers’ journeys – and not many on the market can truly offer those capabilities.

So, what should you be looking for in a call tracking platform and partner? We’ve captured three essential capabilities below to help your search.

1. Track visitors at an individual level to improve conversion rates

To accurately understand the performance of your PPC ads, you need to track visitors at an individual level.

This is one key feature that many call tracking platforms struggle to provide. Limited number pools lead to numbers being reused across PPC ads and landing pages, which limits the value of tracking data and makes it inaccurate.

For example, if the same number is reused across multiple PPC ads, it becomes near-impossible to understand which ad a caller came from, the keywords that prompted their engagement, or if they even came from an ad at all.

Mediahawk solves this problem by ensuring you have enough dynamic numbers for concurrent visitors, and they are not reused. This means a unique phone number is displayed to every single visitor, helping you accurately attribute your callers to the ads they came from.

On the Mediahawk platform, you can:

• Explore detailed visitor reports – which list all the visits you’ve received, and give you the ability to see the entire visitor journey. You can also see valuable data such as the pages they’ve viewed, return visits, and every click they’ve made.
• Understand your conversions with the Pages report – hone in on specific landing pages, see the number of visitors they’ve had, the number of calls they’ve prompted, and how they’re performing as part of your campaign.
• See which keywords work and which don’t – get a detailed view of the keywords in your pay-per-click ads that are actually converting leads to sales and use this information to invest your budget more strategically.

You can even filter calls coming in that might be irrelevant to your sales team, such as wrong numbers, suppliers, and existing clients. For example, if your client is a care home, filtering calls from family members to residents from your reports will allow them to focus solely on converting leads.

If you don’t track calls already, being able to attribute calls to your PPC efforts in any of these ways will see your conversion rates immediately improve – and help you prove to your clients that your ads are generating leads.

2. Attribute your calls accurately to optimise your campaigns and improve lead generation

Few call tracking providers can confidently give you a full picture of where each person has come from – no matter how long or complex their journey was.

Without knowing the full customer journey, it can be easy to attribute a call to the wrong source. For example, if a visitor’s first click was from a PPC ad but they made several visits to your site, and their last click was six months later and came from an email campaign, without accurate attribution, it would be easy to assume the PPC ad wasn’t working.

Mediahawk can accurately attribute 100% of your leads to every single interaction, 100% of the time – ensuring you always have the full picture, regardless of how long the customer journey is.

Using the platform, you can:

• See accurate data in the platform’s Attribution report – where you can view a lead’s first click, last click, and any calls that have happened between their first interaction and their last, giving you a well-rounded picture of their engagement.
• Break down visitors’ journeys in the Source flow report – see a detailed sequence of every marketing source your visitor interacted with, whether they came through your PPC ad to a landing page or whether they’ve bounced back and forth between multiple sources.
• Automatically categorise leads with speech analytics – as well as being able to manually categorise leads, in Mediahawk you can use speech analytics to automatically categorise leads based on insights extracted from calls. This includes everything from identifying callers with high purchase intent to spotting specific keywords that suggest an opportunity for conversion.

Beyond these features, you can even see which journeys are the most popular for generating specific types of engagement such as live chats, phone calls, or emails. With this data, you can easily tweak current and future campaigns to encourage specific types of engagement from your visitors.

This means you’re able to both accurately attribute visits to their sources and play a more active role in successfully generating the right leads for your clients.

Worldpay supports more than 1,000 merchants globally and processes over 40 billion transactions every year. Using Mediahawk, the company achieved 100% marketing attribution and managed to reroute sales leads who were previously being sent to customer services – now ensuring no sales leads are missed and providing a superior customer experience.

3. Clearly demonstrate results to your clients with granular, accurate reporting

Of course, tracking calls to understand your ad performance is only the first step. You also need to be able to demonstrate the results of your ads to prove the value of the service you’re delivering to your clients. And when you’re running campaigns across multiple platforms, this isn’t always simple.

But with Mediahawk’s advanced reporting capabilities, you can easily compare the performance of all the PPC ad platforms you’re using in one place.

Within Mediahawk’s Campaigns report, you can:

• Compare campaigns across Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Facebook ads all in one report, allowing you to make quick links between their performance.
• See granular details such as the total number of calls, and how many were effective or unique.
• See your visitor-to-call ratio for each platform and ad to help you understand and demonstrate the success of those campaigns.
• Integrate sales information from your CRM to see each platform and ad’s cost and overall value, and easily demonstrate ROI.

Beyond a clear demonstration of your ads’ value, you also have access to a broader ‘agency view’ on the platform. Using the Partner Portal, you can view all your clients in one place, making it quicker to spot trends in their ad performance – whether it’s a specific channel delivering great results or a particular ad platform underperforming across every client.

And whenever you do spot trends like these, you’ll have Mediahawk’s experts on hand to support you. They act as an extension of your team – whether you’re an agency or an individual business – to help you get the most out of the Mediahawk platform.

“I think part of our agency growth over the past 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 highlight really good call examples, we can put a monetary value against phone calls, and ultimately, we can optimise our campaigns a lot quicker, smarter, and more efficiently.”
– Raife Wieland, Director and Founder, Promote Online

Summary

While many call tracking platforms and providers can offer you a basic understanding of your leads, very few can offer you the complete picture you need to drive genuinely successful campaigns.

However, the Mediahawk platform can deliver 100% marketing attribution and give you all the intelligence you need to increase leads, drive conversions, and demonstrate success to your clients.

Book your personalised demo today, where you’ll see how Mediahawk can help you optimise your own PPC activity, deliver outstanding results, and demonstrate genuine value to your clients.