The challenge
“We were trying to understand what marketing touchpoints work,” Pamela explains. “Is it PPC? Is it organic? Is it the website? And how does the website perform? The challenge was that we didn’t know the answers to these questions. We needed clarity on which online and offline channels converted the quickest, particularly in driving phone calls and sales.”
AvailableCar had limited tools to analyse the effectiveness of their marketing spend. This meant that they had difficulty understanding the true impact of their marketing channels, and ensuring their budget was allocated effectively.
Their two key issues were:
- They wanted to accurately evaluate the performance of their Google Ads and better understand the impact of their various pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
- They lacked deeper insight into the full customer journey beyond last-click attribution and needed to identify the key touchpoints influencing conversions across multiple interactions.
The solution
Pamela had used call tracking technology in a previous role, and she knew that it would provide them with the actionable insights that they needed to answer those questions, gain a better understanding of their marketing attribution, and improve their return on investment (ROI). The key features for them were:
- Sales Matching to understand more detail about the whole customer journey, and link revenue back to marketing campaigns.
- Dynamic website tracking numbers to understand how online channels are driving phone calls into the dealerships.
- Speech Analytics to understand the breakdown of the types of calls each dealership is getting, and what percentage are sales calls.
The results
“With Mediahawk it’s interesting to see that people go from Google PPC to Google organic, back to PPC, make a phone call, then go back again to organic. We’ve never had that insight before, and you can’t get that from Google Analytics,” says Pamela.
Full-funnel visibility: Understanding the complete customer journey
AvailableCar use Sales Matching to identify the channels that directly deliver revenue to the business, and analyse the influencing touchpoints throughout the customer journey that contribute to sales.
They’ve also added additional dealer specific data to Mediahawk, such as vehicle make and model. With this extra information, they’re able to pivot their data within the platform so that the marketing and sales teams can understand the vehicles sales by channel, as well as the influencing interactions in those buying journeys.
The insights they gain from Sales Matching are communicated back to the wider business to help inform purchasing decisions and the overall strategy.
Identifying which marketing efforts drive high-intent buyers
“Phone calls are important to us because it’s that very direct connection and conversation with a customer. At that point in time, whatever you say has an impact on whether they continue with the sale or they leave.” Pamela goes on to explain, “The phone call – that human element – which we’re very good at, is important because our business is all about people.”
Using dynamic numbers for the dealership websites they can track which marketing channels are driving phone calls to their bricks-and-mortar dealerships. This allows them to connect their online marketing activities – such as directories and paid ads – with inbound phone enquiries for specific locations, and provides a clearer picture of the channels that are most effective in influencing prospects to make contact and convert to a sale.
“Mediahawk enables us to understand when and where our Google Ads performance is dropping off, so we can do something about it quickly,” says Pamela. “The dashboards and reports allow us to easily monitor performance on a daily and weekly basis, so we know if it’s down, what is down, and why it’s down. Then we can take remedial action straight away to improve it.”
Using data to predict and adapt marketing strategies
The ability to track trends in their marketing performance, particularly around phone call generation, was also vital to the team. Having used Mediahawk for over a year, they have access to crucial historical data that they use to inform their current strategies and anticipate future outcomes. This means that they’re able to:
- Devise a data-driven marketing strategy that is aligned with the customer journey to drive enquiries and sales.
- Reliably predict the channels that will deliver the best ROI, and avoid wasting marketing spend on the activities and sources that didn’t perform well previously.
- Proactively identify dips in performance or emerging opportunities so they can confidently make adjustments to campaigns and budget allocation.
“As well as knowing how our channels drive phone calls, what’s also important is that Mediahawk helps us understand the trend throughout the year. We now have data for the last year, so we can look at trends and know what’s coming up. For example, if we know that calls dipped at a certain time last year, we can anticipate the same happening this year and proactively tackle how we can bolster it to improve performance.”
Turning hidden call insights into action with Speech Analytics
Speech Analytics has provided AvailableCar with valuable initial insights into the nature and intent of their inbound phone calls. This is helping them differentiate between sales and non-sales enquiries, and is driving their thinking on how to optimise their marketing efforts to generate more qualified sales calls. “Speech Analytics has shown us really interesting data on the intent of our calls – and how what we thought were sales calls were actually after-sales. So now we can look more closely at how we can use that data to drive more sales calls.”
Pamela’s focus is firmly on continuous improvement and maximising the effectiveness of each channel. Speech Analytics will play a key role in helping AvailableCar refine their marketing strategy. Additionally, their plans to integrate Mediahawk with Power BI will ensure that the valuable marketing analytics they get from Mediahawk is embedded throughout the whole business strategy.