The Importance of Call Tracking for SME’s

How many people actually pick up the phone and call a business once they have landed on their website and how many of those leads actually ended up as a sale?

Well Surveyed companies participating in the May 15, 2008 Search Marketing Now Webcast said that 84% of them close leads generated from their website via the telephone. Adding to this in 2006 comScore found that 63% of search engine user made their purchases offline.

This means that a huge percentage of all sales made are attributed to offline sales, yet when it comes to tracking these phone call conversions the majority of businesses simply don’t bother or rely on crude form of call tracking; like asking the customer how they found you or your advert.

So if you are meticulous enough to be effectively tracking your online sales and conversions, why don’t you do the same with offline sales and conversions using a call tracking solution? If you don’t track your sales calls you are essentially saying that you don’t care about were 52.92% of your offline business is coming from (in most traditional cases; this may be more or less depending on your type of business). If I extend this further and ask how much are you actually spending on advertising per year; you can calculate how much you are potentially wasting? Say you spend £5,000/month, which is £60,000/year on advertising. That means that you are spending £31,752 on advertising which may or may not be working for you. Is that not crazy!

John Wanamaker who is considered the father of modern advertising said; “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. This is a stab in the dark, but let’s say that this is somewhat true in your case, this means you are spending over £15,000 on advertising that generates absolutely no return. Try telling that to your boss or to yourself.

Looking at these figures I wonder why more businesses aren’t using call tracking to monitor all of their advertising more effectively. In some cases it’s because they don’t think it will help, in other cases they think it will cost them too much money and in other cases it’s because they simply don’t know they can.

So I will ask you this; if it doesn’t work, why do some of the most profitable companies in the world do it? It defiantly doesn’t cost the earth, as you can get call tracking from just £30/month in the UK, that’s £360/year which could save you £15,000/year or more. You do the maths.

For those of you reading this who don’t know about the Power of call tracking, you should do by now and if you know of someone who could use it, tell them about it, unless of course you don’t like them.

So it’s simple; track all the sales conversions you can as accurately as you can, using both web analytics and call tracking solutions and use the data to cut down on ineffective advertising and to improve your marketing message. An even better solution to this would be to use a Google Analytics call tracking solution, like AdInsight offers, which allows the call data to be reported in Google Analytics for even better integration.

If you do this well your business will thrive in any economy, unless of course your product is useless.

Tagged with: adinsight • analytics • call tracking • conversions

Filed under: Marketing Guides • marketing tips • secret marketing strategies • web 2.0

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