A lot of specialists face the same problem. A client comes asking to configure ad campaigns, develop a strategy and increase sales. However, when everything is done, he claims that the advertising is useless, a budget is wasted and there are no leads. Thankfully, call tracking is a way to disprove it and to establish long-term cooperation. Read below about its benefits and types of clients who need call tracking.
In this article, we are going to discuss PPC Specialists working in an agency, as well as freelancers. Unlike their in-house colleagues, freelancers have to face additional difficulties.
- Freelancers need to motivate their clients to continue their partnerships all the time, otherwise, they will go to the competitors.
- If a client has in-house specialists, freelancers have to prove that customers were brought from the advertising that was configured by them.
- A client usually trusts his sales reps. When there is a famous conflict “marketing vs sales”, the client stands by his employees. In this case, it is hard for a freelance PPC Specialist to prove that there are leads, however, it is the sales reps’ fault that there are no calls.
It is hard to solve these problems if at least some customers contact your client via phone. Google Analytics can’t show the exact advertisement that brought calls from customers. Nevertheless, сall tracking helps to understand that a client received 50 calls, 80% of which were targeted.
Being a full-cycle advertising agency, we can’t evaluate the effectiveness of online advertisements only. We work with integrated ad campaigns, where we use several media types: outdoor advertising, radio, etc. Call tracking helps us to understand the efficacy of each channel usage”.
However, call tracking is not only a must-have for analytics. An agency and freelancer also receive additional advantages that we will illustrate through some examples.
1. The proof of advertisement efficacy
“My sales reps are the best, it’s the advertising that is configured in a wrong way”. In case if there are no calls, 7 out of 10 businessmen think so before the call tracking set up. Nevertheless, after the installation, everything starting to become clear. This is because the statistics on all incoming calls are collected in the call log. Including missed ones.
The screenshot below will set an example from the real project:
- statistics for two hours and a half;
- eight calls in total;
- and all eight are missed;
- five out of them are unique — in other words, a company lost five leads.
It is enough to show the client the report on missed calls from paid ads. If there are calls, however, leads are not processed due to some reasons, the client won’t have any questions. You will easily prove that you work effectively and not waste the budget.
One more example from the case of the Promo agency. The insurance and lending web portal is the client that earlier was sure in the absence of calls from advertisements. And even if there were some, they were coming from irrelevant regions. However, the agency proved that there were calls, by showing the report on missed calls to a customer. Moreover, there were calls from residents of cities and regions that are the company’s target audience.
An additional bonus is that the agency discovered why calls had a low conversion to deals. By listening to calls specialists found out that the problem was in sales reps short answers. When customers from other cities asked where the company is placed, employees answered that it is in Kyiv. However, they omitted that they send policies across Ukraine within one day.
Due to service features, we have something to answer to common customer objections. The most frequent are: “advertising doesn’t bring sales”, “we have untargeted calls because of you”, “our sales department is the best” etc.”
2. The service value increasing
A lot of companies make paid ads randomly, not even hoping to see a clear result on it. They don’t know the real effectiveness of paid ads and that’s why they barely ready to increase the budget. Nevertheless, if a client sees that the advertisement works and there is cost recovery, he can allocate more money on promotion. As a result, an agency or a freelancer increases its/his own profit.
If a client doesn’t have call tracking, the growth of calls after ad campaigns launching is not connected to them. However, if we see that calls are brought from a cpc channel, a client can clearly see the results of our work”.
3. Transparent accounting
Having the full information on online conversions and calls, PPC Specialist can provide to a customer detailed reports on his work. Thus, the client will feel that he controls the promotion process and the budget allocated to it. If there are customized end-to-end analytics, the client will also see the cost recovery of money invested in advertising.
Moreover, using additional tools for analytics and visualization, the specialist can provide information via illustrations and graphs. Offering simple, clear tools for evaluating your work efficacy, will help you to push the client to cooperation at the early beginning.
The example below is the hospital case. This way the Convert agency visualizes the data using Power BI. For this purpose is used the integration of Ringostat with BI platform + Renta service that forwards data from Google Analytics to the database. Information from other advertising offices such as Google Ads, Facebook, etc. are also sending there.
The description of systems that we use for this and to measure KPI is the obligatory part of every presentation. It is in every offer for clients”.
4. The retention rate increasing
Business representatives are happy when they receive calls. If you generate more profit for clients, the retention rate increases as well. Call tracking provides several methods to prolong your partnership with the client and prevent the possible churn.
Call tracking helps to find out ineffective advertisements and opt-out them. It also helps to allocate the budget among more successful ad campaigns. That’s how the Smartum agency saved 54% of the client’s budget, as well as invested money in the advertisement that brought calls. As a result, the number of calls increased almost up to 3 times.
SOTNIK agency was able to decrease the cost on lead, however, the client started to receive more requests. Nevertheless, in the examples above, the budget was the same.
One more way to increase the client’s loyalty is to decrease the number of missed leads and to increase the website’s conversion. The best thing here is the callback form that is one of the call tracking features. If a customer is confused by something he can request a call and ask the question. The additional advantage is the detailed statistics on sources that bring calls via callback form.
5. Additional revenue
If a call tracking service has a partnership program, the agency or a freelance specialist receives a reward for the users that they brought. Thus, in Ringostat account, a partner sees the detailed information on all clients, the turnover, as well as he can manage projects.
Any partner receives bonuses according to his turnover. The more enabled projects and clients that pay for service for a long period, the higher is the reward.
Clients who need call tracking
If you want to understand whether the client needs call tracking, assume the following aspects.
- The number of calls. Eugene Glazyrin from Netpeak is guided by the following: “You need a call tracking if the number of calls is 20-30% from the number of all requests. The omission of calls might affect the whole picture of evaluating the company’s effectiveness. Moreover, it won’t let you persuade the client to invest money in the paid traffic channel”.
- The percentage of calls and the cost of advertising. Call tracking is useful in such cases:
- calls are more than 20-30% of requests, however, the monthly budget for paid ads is bigger than 500$;
- calls are more than 60% of requests, however, the monthly budget for paid ads is bigger than 200$.
- The niche of business. Calls are highly important in such spheres as real estate, online stores, medicine, legal services, and insurance, building materials, education, and household services.
- Calculation of profitability of call tracking installation. It is usually made by Ringostat sales rep, however, you can receive the pre-assessment using the online calculator.
Summary
There are several reasons to use call tracking if you are a freelancer or an agency PPC Specialist. To summarize and supplement them, let’s give the opinion of Eugene Lee, the Smartum agency Head of Customer Projects.
- Call tracking provides more information on advertising activities’ effectiveness. You can’t track all conversions on the website using standard methods. However, the target call is comparable to a successful conversion.
- It helps to understand the effectiveness of a certain channel. For example, 30% — paid ads, 40% — organic, etc.
- Competitive advantage over other agencies. Despite the growth of call tracking popularity and simplicity of setup, some agencies ignore such an opportunity. The fact that an agency uses call tracking, indicates its interest and involvement, its way of work and its understanding of effectiveness.
- It gives an opportunity to make conclusions on the quality of calls accepting and processing, both for an agency and a client.
- Simplicity and transparency of statistics for a client. Special terminology and rates confuse lots of clients: conversions, transactions, CPC, CTR, CPA. That’s why calls are very simple and clear metrics for them.
- Call tracking provides a callback to increase the whole number of calls and to improve the user’s experience.
- The analysis of calls gives additional information on products/services, targeted audience, competitors and market. Sometimes such data become some kind of insight even for the client.
