Proving ROI with Call Tracking

We’re always looking for new & better ways to track ROI back to our client’s online ad spend. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but it’s pretty easy to track visitor interactions on a website – form completions, pdf downloads, purchasing a product – especially when you have a team of savvy programmers at your disposal. But how can you track valuable offline interactions back to online ad spend? This is where it gets a bit tricky, but definitely doable. In a previous post, I wrote about importing monetary values back into AdWords when a sale occurs offline, but the lead was generated online. What about when the lead was also generated offline? For example, someone visits your site from an AdWords ad then picks up their home phone (do these exist anymore?) and manually dials a phone number listed on your site? Yup, we can track that!

What Are You Talking About?!?!
Back in August, AdWords introduced Website Call Conversions. Website Call Conversions allow you to track phone calls back to ad clicks by inserting a Google Call Forwarding number on your site.

How Does it Work!?!?!
A searcher clicks on your AdWords ad. When they arrive at your site, your real business phone number is dynamically replaced with a unique tracking number. The visitor sees this tracking number, calls it, and then metrics like call date, call duration, area code, and more are tracked and reported back into your Google AdWords account attributing calls down to the keyword level.

I Still Don’t See the Value!?!?!
We implemented this type of call tracking for a hotel client last month. Within days, calls were getting generated from AdWords ads that were previously blind to us. Simply by reporting call times & durations back to their team, they were able to identify successful bookings and corresponding revenues. Pretty powerful stuff!

Do you know what your campaigns are doing? If not, why not?