Improve your PPC returns

Category: Data and analytics
Do you measure the number of telephone calls your PPC adverts have received?
How are you continually improving your position and quality score?

If you don’t measure the number of calls you get from your PPC ads, you may have been missing out on leads that were attributed to another form of marketing. This will have an adverse effect on your planning and may result in you decreasing your budget on what is actually a successful marketing channel.

Knowing what keywords used generate clicks that result in a sale means you can continue to optimise your PPC ads, improving your ranking while lowering costs, too.

How does it work?

Measuring telephone response to PPC advertising is straightforward. When a prospect clicks on your ad through to your website, a dynamic telephone number will appear on your site, unique to that visitor. It’s that uniqueness that links their activity, keywords used, ad clicked on and more to any calls and sales that occur as a result.

In addition, knowing that 70% of all people searching for a business via their mobile will call directly from search results – that is, use search as a phone directory – then adding a trackable number directly to your PPC ad in the form of a phone number extension makes a huge amount of sense.

Measuring this activity will give you a much clearer picture of how your leads found you and why they made contact. When you analyse your marketing campaigns, you’ll know where every lead has been generated from – and which adverts are worth spending your vital marketing budget on.

The marketer’s checklist

As a busy marketer it is vital to have a clear understanding of where your responses are coming from. With numerous ways a prospect can contact you, it is more difficult to get a definitive picture of exactly what made the telephone ring.

  • Assign call tracking telephone numbers to every form of marketing
  • Set up reporting to enable clear analysis of every campaign
  • Identify the criteria you wish to capture (location, keyword, source etc.)

Mediahawk integrates with AdWords and Bing and automatically calculates your PPC cost-per-lead and ROI. From this, you can:

  • Understand how important it is to have a good sales process in place.
  • Ensure that your sales team are handling the inbound telephone leads in the right way.
  • Set up call recording to play back calls and assess the standard of your in-house enquiry handling.

Overall, it is vital to have a clear idea what activity is generating the leads that turn into sales, not just end up as another contact on the database. By setting up a call tracking solution to capture these leads you will be able to identify which adverts are generating the most leads.

About the author - Natalia Selby

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