According to recent research into mobile advertising, around 70% of people who conduct searches on their mobile devices utilise click-to-call in order to reach your site. Due to this reality, it is important to ensure that all calls to your site are tracked appropriately, so that you can make cost effective improvements to your campaigns based on empirical analysis of trends and keywords.

If you are aware that a higher number of your sites overall sales are completed via telephone, then you should look into the acquisition of Google’s new call conversion tracking, which is on offer at present at no cost at all.

The search engine giant has already provided call extensions which enable to you utilise a unique telephone number in your PPC advertisements for a number of years now. However, the great difficulty which has confronted webmasters is that many visitors do not make calls directly from their advertisements; instead they usually direct themselves to your site first, and then embark on calling you. This puts marketers in a weak position as they are left unable to ascertain where they are getting called from and which aspect of their campaign contributed towards a conversion. And whilst their call extension facilities has enabled you to analyse which of your PPC advertisements have induced phone calls, and assisted you with determining the costs of each call, it has nevertheless failed to give you an insight into which aspects of your campaign are most effective at generating phone call conversions.

Introduce Google’s free, call-tracking software that will allow you to utilise different telephone numbers on your site, so you can identify the ones which are generating the most phone calls. You can still use call extensions to assist you with selecting the optimal advertisements for driving phone calls but supplement this with their new tracking programme in order to analyse which keywords brought users of your site to it in the first place.

In order to make the most of this new facility, you will have to display visual text phone numbers, rather than graphics, and insert some script onto your site. Google are then able to radically alter the number displayed on your site in accordance with the keywords you are utilisation and the overall outlook of your campaign. Thus, when a user visits your site from an advertisement on their search engine, they will be greeted with two numbers; your primary number and a unique one which allows individual analysis. You can then evaluate the performance of these different numbers in order to determine which keywords and elements of your campaigns are generating the most phone calls.
Call tracking can be undertaken in two primary ways:

Session-Orientated – This is when all incoming traffic receives a unique telephone number in accordance with the URL they were referred from
Rule-Orientated – This is when you utilise specific phone numbers for different campaigns.

So, how can call-tracking software benefit you?

In the past few years, I have consistently reiterated that the acquisition of call-tracking and analytical software is essential for any company which generates over 25% of its sales and leads via the telephone. This is because phone-orientated businesses can simply not afford to miss out on the refinement capabilities that call analytics provide, particularly when it requires minimal outlay to ensure that their campaigns and keywords are optimised for success.

It is also important you remember that in order to set up tracking for your alternative marketing campaigns on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Bing, you will have to utilise a third party vendor. Whilst adopting this strategy can often be expensive, it is nevertheless the best way to attain the most accurate information about the nature of the telephone calls you are receiving in different areas of your marketing endeavours.

And ultimately the most important aspect of SEO marketing is to find the keywords which induce the highest ROI and optimising the volume you attain from these selected terms.

Prior to the introduction of call tracking and its supplementary analytic facilities, the main way to identify these keywords was to bury you within your web analytics in order to determine which terms induced the highest number of conversions on the net. This would usually only concentrate on form fills and product acquisitions, which would not be suited to analysing specific activity from mobile users; an essential in today’s rapidly expanding mobile market.

Use your competition to your advantage

In the SEO world, competition is an integral component of improvement for campaign managers, and this is no different when it comes to keyword analysis. A great way to ascertain which keywords stand to provide you with a high ROI is to spy on them with adeptly suited technology such as www.ispionage.com. Sites such as these are programmed specifically to determine how effective a keyword is at inducing traffic and conversions, and presents this to you via a numerical index. You can utilise this software in order to identify which keywords are performing well for your competition, which have high visibility levels and the ones which consistently display the highest average ranking position.

Typically, all keywords which exhibit a keyword effectiveness index of over 85 are performing strongly for a marketer, though you will really want to be looking out for the 90+ words to fully incorporate into your own strategy. You should also look at the search volume of the terms in order to determine which should be adopted immediately, and which ones can be phased in at a later date. Employing this technique can help you both keep up and surpass your competition as time progresses and will also give you a clear idea of which keywords will generate you a profit on your outlay.

Conclusion

To conclude, Google’s decision to provide new call-tracking software without charge is a game changer that will revolutionise the analytical capabilities of campaign managers across the globe. In particular, it is businesses which generate a large proportion of their sales and leads from the telephone that stand to benefit the most as they will now be able to learn where they are receiving these calls for, which of course will enable them to attain a larger profit margin for every keyword they use. Moreover, it can help with the improvement of other areas of their online marketing campaigns as the keywords which tend to generate sales and leads online tend to mirror those which induce success via the telephone.

Whilst there is still a question about the reliability of some of the disclosures provided by the tracking, it is nevertheless and an essential acquisition for campaign strategists in the modern era; a mobile era may I add which requires innovations such as these to ensure that its inhabitants are sufficiently equipped to maximise their profitability from the new telephone-based demand worldwide.