Posts Tagged ‘call tracking system’

The Fundaments of Phone Call Analytics

Monday, November 9th, 2009

When detailing the benefits of phone call analytics with Google Analytics integration, it’s often easy to fall into the trap of either preaching to the converted who already comprehend why this service is a good thing, while failing to clarify exactly what phone call analytics is for people who are encountering it for the first time. The purpose of this article is to demystify the process by which phone number tracking brings your company a significant increase in conversions and a greater degree of accuracy with your company’s offline ad campaigns.

In the most basic sense, phone call analytics allows a company to constantly monitor and adapt your offline advertising campaign, and also to interpret data to ensure that the great number of offline-originated calls end up in conversions, just as one might control online conversions using web analytics. There are many aspects to a phone call analytics system, and many levels on which the data can be integrated and applied in order to make active choices about an ad campaign. However, in the case of this article, the most apparent benefits of website telephone tracking will be discussed. First of all, let’s explain how a company might use phone call analytics to monitor and adapt an ad campaign.

In a standard case of call tracking, the individual numbers generating calls are entered into the software so that they can be identified and the data from that specific number can be collected. For the entire call, the caller-experience is identical to a usual call; the recording of the call data is invisible and entirely non-disruptive. Each call is recorded, and the advertising generating that call is logged as an individual piece of data distinguishable from other numbers in the same campaign. What this means is that numbers generating calls can be identified, and a company can see for itself which numbers are costing valuable advertising investment but are delivering no sales. Effectively, phone call analytics marks the end of wasted advertising investment that is being lost through the inability to track which conversions happen from which offline-generated calls.

A further grey-area of the awareness of a campaigns success is clarified with the implementation of phone call analytics - numbers that are generating calls but are failing to result in conversions can be identified and modified, and important changes to a campaign can be made swiftly and with minimal loss of advertising investment. This is a common experience in the optimization of an ad campaign; call analytics simply minimizes the loss of investment, and the time it takes to identify and neutralize these problems.

The implementation of call analytics provides the evidence you need on which to ground further decisions concerning your campaign; with call tracking, keywords generating conversions can be distinguished from those failing to reach their potential - without call tracking, making potentially-costly decisions as to the performance of an offline ad campaign still holds an aspect of blind trust in the total performance (or lack thereof) of an individual campaign. For SEO workers, it is possible to prove to the client the validity of ad investment expenditure with exact statistics recorded in real time by the phone call analytics software. For an SEO, this is becoming a reality as more and more competitors can offer clients this level of accuracy and evidence of their positive work.

Call recording and e-mail notification for out-of-hours and missed calls can scoop up a tremendous amount of leads that would otherwise run totally cold. With a call analytics system, it is incredibly easy to follow up and recapture lost leads. As each call is logged and recorded, missed calls and out-of-hours calls no longer need to be a problem - many companies have been astounded to find the amount of missed calls and out-of-hours calls they have missed through a lack of call tracking software. Often with companies with very little manpower, a huge amount of conversions can be picked up by simply opening for business on a day previously thought to be generating no calls. Being able to recapture lost leads rescues a great amount of revenue and custom that would otherwise vanish without call tracking - whether a sale is £10 or £1000 per conversion, this aspect of call tracking is sure to dramatically boost your conversion ratio.

Hopefully this article has managed to explain in more detail the active benefits of phone call analytics, and various ways in which a call analytics system will serve to boost your conversion ratio. Though this article deals with the basic advantages of phone call analytics, the advent of Google Analytics integration with call tracking is currently huge news in the SEO/SEM sphere, so expect to hear a great deal more about the power of call tracking, whether you are an SEO worker, an online marketer, or are looking to develop your online sales presence.

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Call Tracking, Web Analytics and CRM: Combining Technology for Better Business

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

For a business’s internet marketing strategy, there is an increasing need for all aspects of your advertising strategy to be justified. In this article, we’ll look at a range of solutions geared towards tightening up your overall marketing success to an optimum level, ensuring at all times that you’re making the best decisions to push your business forward. The temptation for companies to panic themselves into a state of parsimoniousness with their advertising budget can prove fatal at this time, especially for fledgling businesses caught at the turn of the crisis - the key to success is to make the most of your ad budget, while safeguarding it as best as possible. The surest way of doing this is to utilize all the current technologies available.

In terms of business advantages, you wish to be able to obtain masses of data conducive to gaining an insight on the continued success of your ad campaigns. For your online activity, web analytics is the most powerful tool in allowing you to gain extensive data on your customer demographic and customer interaction with your website. With Google Analytics and Google AdWords, it is possible to discern which changes to your website are generating further leads and sales, and to identify trends in visitor’s landing pages to your website. This allows you to take control of your online marketing presence - no more tweaking and simply guessing as to whether your changes will produce results. This makes a dramatic difference in improving your conversion ratio, and helps to sustain and expand upon one’s web presence confidently.

While your online conversion ratio is becoming tighter, something must be done about offline telephone calls made from an online encounter with your business or service. A telephone lead is considered by many online marketers to be the superior form of customer contact generating conversions. Up until fairly recently, there was simply no way in which this data could be handled intelligently. phone tracking is the solution to this problem. By applying unique telephone numbers to your ad campaign, offline calls from printed ads, radio and TV can be separated and traced to their individual source, giving you a definitive picture on the success of each campaign, down to numbers of calls, sales and leads, even sales amounts and an instant calculation of your ROI. Unproductive ads can be cut, and the budget re-distributed to form a campaign generating more conversions. A call tracking system skips the notoriously unreliable method of questioning customers and sales teams in order to conduct important market research - it is as powerful as its online web analytics counterpart. Call tracking also features call recording and lost-lead recapture, to ensure that the maximum amount of calls turn into sales through sales team training, and the ability to reconnect with customers failing to reach you through the telephone ad.

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution allows you to confidently acquire, retain, and extend custom. Once you have spent your advertising budget and have attracted customers, it is economically sound to learn as much about their needs as possible, as this makes further sales opportunities possible without the need for further ad budget expenditure. This is of course also incredibly healthy for your business image, as it helps to build a lasting relationship between the customer and your business or service. A properly implemented CRM solution ensures that the maximum amount of conversions can be made with no more than the necessary spend on budget. A database of customer purchases, the progress of a potential lead and so on helps to keep a pro-active approach to making conversions, instead of simply sitting back and doing nothing to encourage customers to buy.

In conclusion, taking the plunge and finding out just what internet marketing solutions can push your company forward is the right choice for businesses wanting to ride out the financial crisis. Your ad budget is only useful when it’s being spent - with CRMs, web analytics and a call tracking system, you are able to properly monitor and adapt all aspects of your ad campaign. The current advancements in the sphere of intelligent analytics solutions means that you’ll hear a lot about the subject in the near future. Take some time to see for yourself how this technology will save your investment and boost your conversions.

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