Tracked by wire: call tracking will increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns
Posted by Mikhail Fedorinin, founder of Calltouch.
The last couple of years in the online promotion of e-commerce clearly traced the trend of deep analytics. And if two years ago the path of a visitor to an online store from advertising in Yandex.Direct to buying a product on a site could be tracked using Google Analytics, then it was almost impossible to understand how the person who called by the phone found out about the company. In this regard, the stores did not understand what kind of advertising attracted this part of the audience and how to motivate it to buy. Today, the answer to these questions is provided by an Internet marketing tool - dynamic call tracking.
Call tracking works according to the following scheme: each visitor to the site sees a unique phone number and, as soon as he calls the company, the service determines from which source the person came to the resource and which phrase (keyword) he entered in the Yandex search line. For example, the report will show that the user who called 123-45-67 came from an ad to Yandex.Direct on the request “buy a refrigerator”. Some time after the visitor leaves the site, the phone number is transferred to the next one, therefore, with daily visits to the online store, for example, by 10 thousand people, you will need no more than 100 numbers that will be assigned only to this resource.
Suppose call tracking data shows that the keyword “buy a refrigerator” received a lot of calls, but the number of orders did not increase. In this case, you should think about the effectiveness of this request and use phrases that bring sales. The integration of call tracking with CRM, where each transaction is displayed, will help to identify them.
Companies that provide a wider range of services, for example, the sale and maintenance of air conditioners, should share the flow of calls. The user can see the advertisement for the air conditioner, but call for service. If this appeal is included in the general statistics, the evaluation of the advertising campaign will be erroneous. Some online stores distribute calls using call center operators who manually mark the purpose of each call. However, this method is imperfect: a person may make a mistake or specifically “wind up” the number of sales calls if his salary depends on this indicator.
Separate calls as accurately as possible allows the integration of call tracking in the voice menu, in which the caller determines the purpose of the call. So, if a person is going to purchase an air conditioner, he needs to press the “1” key in tone mode, and to receive a consultation on maintenance - press the “2” key. Information is automatically displayed in the call tracking system, assigning to each call the tags “sale” and “service”. By highlighting targeted appeals in this way, you can focus on those inquiries and channels that bring sales. In this case, it is worth considering the cost of attracting one client, which is calculated from the ratio of promotion costs to total profit. For example, the price of one appeal for the keyword "Koltach" is 96.03 rubles - this is quite a lot compared to other phrases that cost from 19 to 58 rubles. You could just remove it from the ads, but before making such a decision, you must evaluate it in terms of acceptable cost of circulation (CPA), which each company selects individually. Suppose we determined a CPA of 100 rubles, the cost of circulation for the word “Koltach” is lower, which means that you can use it in advertising.
Having identified the sources and keywords that bring sales, it is necessary to determine the most effective time for advertising. For example, statistics from the online cosmetics store show that most often users call on weekdays from 12:00 to 13:00. This is not surprising: as a rule, people study similar sites during the working day, but prefer to call when there are no colleagues nearby - at lunchtime. Information about the peak of calls will help to adjust the time of advertising and get a larger number of calls with the same budget.
By the way, call tracking makes life easier for ordinary Internet users. By analyzing the keywords that people often use to search for products in search engines, online stores can create the most useful advertisements. For example, if a buyer wants to buy a wooden table in Moscow and enters this query into the Yandex search line, he sees an advertisement for companies selling wooden tables, not metal chairs. Thus, the user immediately finds what he is looking for.
Considering call tracking data on call peak times, an online store can increase the number of call center operators by certain hours and save customers from having to wait on the line.
In addition, call analytics makes it possible to increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns with the same budget and save prices for goods without increasing them, which is especially important for buyers in times of crisis.
Call tracking capabilities do not end there and in the near future the market is waiting for another breakthrough. For example, we plan to complete the integration of the service with a speech recognition system. Using this technology will automatically determine the purpose of the client’s appeal, without requiring additional actions from him, and divide calls into “service” and “sales”, reducing staff costs and reducing the percentage of errors.
Speech recognition will help improve the quality of the sales team. To do this, it is enough to load into the program phrases that employees are encouraged to pronounce when communicating with customers and words that need to be excluded. By automatically analyzing the conversation, the program will determine how correctly the manager conducted the conversation and will report if, for example, he was rude or did not offer the client an additional service.
The information obtained using the speech recognition tool will increase sales by increasing the effectiveness of advertising. For example, the program will help identify words that were not previously used in ads, but are regularly used by customers in a conversation when they call the online store. By including them in the text of the advertisement, we can increase the reach of the audience and attract new potential customers.
Source: Russian Business Newspaper .