Excel Visibility: Supercharge Your Digital Advertising ROI with Phone Calls

Tuesday, 9 January 2018

Supercharge Your Digital Advertising ROI with Phone Calls

Even in today’s digital world, phone calls remain one of the best ways to earn a customer’s business. Thanks to smartphones, consumers who research purchases online and engage with digital advertising often convert by calling. So how do we attribute phone conversations to the success of digital ads? Easy. Apply a data-driven approach to your phone conversations to better understand the ROI you receive from your online spend.

Let’s start with the “WHY” – why are phone calls important to digital advertising ROI?

Smartphones are our primary device for everything. Over 51% of website traffic comes from smartphones, making them the most popular mobile device for internet users. And if your business relies on Facebook ads, 87% of the social media platform’s 2 billion users access via mobile device.

Marketers have shifted ad spend to target smartphones. From 2015 to 2020, mobile ad spend will exceed desktop ad spend by over three times, with total investment increasing to $86.84 billion. The more ads that appear on mobile, the more phone calls that drive consumers to a company website, making it that much easier to convert a sale.

More digital ads on smartphones result in more phone calls. Based on BIA/Kelsey research, the number of calls from digital ads is expected to rise from 76 billion in 2014 to 162 billion by 2019. For any business that prioritizes phone calls in its marketing strategy, this provides a great competitive advantage over companies not analyzing calls.

Phone calls convert to customers at a high rate. Compared to web leads, calls convert revenue at a rate 10-15x higher. With calls expected to influence $1 trillion in US consumer spending this year, this provides a tremendous opportunity for businesses to capture market share.

Calls are critical to most customer journeys. Phone conversations are an important aspect of the customer journey in most major industries. In health care, 88% of patients book appointments over the phone, while 68% of consumers researching financial services prefer to call before purchasing and 75% of insurance shoppers call an agent or contact center.

Now the “HOW” – how to apply a data-driven approach to phone calls.

Make it easy for consumers to call. Ensure your website is optimized to drive phone calls, particularly on mobile. By including calls-to-action (CTA) with your phone number throughout the site, you increase the visibility and opportunity for consumers to initiate a call. Simplify this process by including your phone number in your CTAs on paid, social and display ads.

Measure the impact of calls on business results. With call attribution technology, you can see what drove the call, gather caller information to build a custom profile and determine the quality of the lead to understand the value of the conversation.

Integrate call analytics data with marketing and ad platforms. There are a number of customer relationship management (CRM) and analytics reporting tools to help you track, visualize and manage your call metrics to turn raw data into meaningful insights.

Use call analytics to optimize digital ad targeting. Through use of call analytics, businesses can retarget past callers with ads to entice them to call again, target audiences resembling similar customers who have called before, and exclude callers who aren’t relevant leads. Prioritizing call data will ultimately help optimize your digital ad strategy, ensuring you’re getting ads in front of your target audience.

Use call analytics to improve caller experience. In today’s consumer-driven world, people want their experience with a business to run as efficiently as possible. Using call analytics to optimize your caller experience can be the difference between making a sale or losing it. An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system can help route callers appropriately to ensure they have the best experience possible.

Analyze what happens on calls for important insights. Through use of a conversation analytics tool, organizations can track key insights gathered from the call, which can then be used to strengthen marketing and sales efforts.

You have all these valuable metrics and insights, so now what? Optimize your marketing strategy to drive the most calls and customers. Invest your spending in the right channels, ads and keywords to drive the best calls and ROI. Strengthen your website content by creating compelling CTAs to drive the most calls and customers. Target leads from your audience by displaying the right ads at the right times. Monitor your caller experience to ensure leads aren’t wasted. And, most importantly, prove how these phone calls are impacting your digital advertising ROI and the organization as a whole.