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Call Tracking: Now Becoming a Necessity for PPC Advertisers
By Joe Castro | November 13, 2008
With the economy still heading in the wrong direction, PPC advertisers are now held more accountable for showing results. This is understandable because the advertiser is paying more and more for each click. Most every paid search advertiser should have conversion tracking for all of their campaigns by now, such as Google Conversion Tracking or a third party tracking system to track leads/sales via PPC advertising.
On any well-developed and designed landing page, you should have a 1-800 number for potential Internet users to help reach you. Many advertisers use the same 1-800 number on their landing page for all marketing efforts. This is a big no-no. It is very important to be able to show all sales/leads that your PPC efforts have brought in.
In addition, depending on the complexity and cost of the product/service you are selling, users may be more inclined to call as opposed to purchasing or filling out a lead form on your website. Therefore, without proper call tracking, you could be reporting much less than you are actually providing for your client or your business.
There are two ways to properly track phone calls for your Paid Search efforts:
- Tell your advertiser or your business that they need to purchase a dedicated 1-800 number for Paid Search purposes only. This can work well if the landing page and all other pages that you can get to from your landing page are used solely for PPC (although this is highly unlikely). In addition, you have to rely on the client to report back to you the amount of calls received and if possible, the result of the call.
- Use a call tracking system, such as Fathom Call Tracking. This call tracking system uses JavaScript code and dynamically changes the phone number when someone enters your website via a pay-per-click ad.
Fathom Call Tracking allows you to see how many calls they receive from PPC, the duration of the call, the name of the caller (when applicable), the result of the call (if recording is enabled), call forwarding based on area code, and many other options.
Regardless of how you track your phone calls, just make sure you do and you may be surprised to the actual value you are providing to your business or your clients with PPC.
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