Call tracking technology is rapidly gaining popularity among progressive companies, but the lack of understanding of its principles can lead to different prejudices. The myth destroyer, Konstantin Cherviakov, CCO at Ringostat, figures out whether they have a solid basis or they’re just the creations of clients’ vivid imagination.
It’s the third and final article in series “Encyclopedia of call tracking”. The first part is about the most common fears, the second one is dedicated to pains. Hope you’ll find them useful.
Prejudice #1: We’ll use call tracking for two months to see the statistics, and won’t use it after
Some clients believe in this simple algorithm:
- determining the effectiveness of advertising;
- budget allocation;
- finishing using call tracking;
- live happily and carefree.
Counter-arguments
Try to answer this question: “Have you ever seen somebody installing Google Analytics and uninstalled it in two months?”
To calm yourself you can read these facts:
- competition increases constantly – cost per click in contextual advertising is growing along with the competition, and all of this affects the efficiency and profitability of investments in marketing;
- advertising trends are changeable, and any successful companies must monitor them.
- new advertising tools appear regularly and they need to be tested;
- trends of demand change, a good manager or marketer has to understand them and use them in a marketing strategy.
- And there are no boundaries for perfection, of course.
Conclusion #1
Do the travelers think about throwing away the compass after seeing the directions of north and south? The world changes faster than you can imagine and we always need some landmarks in order to know where we are. Losing landmarks for business means additional expenditures, significant expenditures. You have to keep abreast in order to see all strategic turnings and new market trends and thus to receive a competitive advantage. Your analytical statistics is a compass and you can throw it away only when it doesn’t work.
Prejudice #2: We use Google Analytics, purchases are made online, so we don’t need call tracking
Here are two сommon objections to the implementation of call tracking:
- we have less than 30% of purchases made by phone, we don’t have to track them;
- we’ve got an online store — purchases have to be made through the cart.
Counter-arguments
For the beginning we’ll talk about the “intricate ways” companies use sometimes.
Set the target to view the page “contacts”
This aim isn’t correct. Statistics shows that customers call more often when seeing phone number in the header, it’s seldom when they read footer. Also calculation of the error rate can be difficult, because a lot of users can see the page with contacts, but they don’t call.
Set the target on clicks on the phone number
In reality the number of phone calls is bigger than Google Analytics shows. You can invent more options, but you’ll have to calculate error rates comparing the number of goals achieved with the actual number of calls. You’ll need it to answer the question if it’s correct to consider this data to determine effectiveness.
And the main arguments are:
- In some spheres phone calls are 10-15 times more likely to be converted into purchases than the applications on the site.
- Average ticket of people buying through the phone is 90% higher than those of people buying online. That’s why it’s useful to understand how do the channels attracting people buying more expensive goods work.
- Customers buying online and using mobile phones belong to different psychological types, they can behave quite differently responding to different types of advertising and coming from different advertising channels.
- 66% of sales managers think that phone calls are more effective than other types of leads.
Conclusion #2
Not every business depends entirely on the calls:
- there are baskets in the online stores;
- 50-70% of orders in online fast foods are made through the basket;
- in some spheres it’s very popular to fill the online application;
- there are some exceptions where phone calls are not needed at all.
However, you should always remember that your most popular advertising channel doesn’t attract all the customers.
Analytics is not a guesswork, it’s the construction of hypotheses and conclusions on the basis of specific statistical data. Thanks to technological progress the access to this data becomes more and more extensive. The more you know about new technologies such as call tracking, the more clear becomes the necessity of its implementation.
