Posts Tagged ‘call tracking’

The Travel Industry and the Benefits of Telephone Call Tracking


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For many companies, regardless of the revenue of online sales, offline calls contribute a massive amount of the overall conversion ratio. The generally-agreed total of offline calls generated through an online search is around 43%*. When these calls generally make up the higher revenue totals, there is an immediate problem in the task of interpreting the success of the marketing campaign.

This often happens in areas such as the travel industry: it is to be expected that, for larger sales amounts which require more commitment from the customer, the customer will often opt to contact a sales advisor over the phone to close the deal. When you think that such a vast percentage of sales are conducted through this method, it has to be understood that, without the ability to analyze the ad source for these sales, the information surrounding the customer’s point of contact with your company is either confused or lost altogether.

Call tracking software bridges this gap over the chasm of the offline marketing picture. Given the make-up of such an industry’s total revenue, this allows the expansion of sales and leads tracking into the heretofore ‘blind’ area of offline calls generated online, and a deeper knowledge of the performance of newspaper, radio and television advertising. With the emergence of telephone conversion tracking, this huge grey area of the marketing picture is filled in with incredible detail.

The data retrieved using call analytics is essentially of a purely practical nature, and serves to empower action made to the upkeep of a marketing campaign. The marketing budget of any business is often proportionally relative – with a smaller company, it is especially precious; with an established business it is no less indispensable because there is more of it. Being able to streamline and conserve even 10% would be a massive improvement of marketing efficiency, and as individual ad campaign numbers can be identified and confidently supplemented or reduced, savings of this kind are simply a matter of rational comparison and action.

Imagine, for example, that your new television advert has just cost you a more than sizeable chunk of your ad budget. Sales increase, and so, happily, you consider to continue the ad, or even to expand on it, developing and furthering this particular campaign. In reality, the decision to pump more budget into this campaign is not as practical or sure-footed as it seems; it could even be that the ad is failing miserably in achieving justifiable ROI, and the sales peak is being generated by discrete from the TV ad.

With a call tracking solution, every call contributing to this sales peak can be sourced and accounted for. A system of identifiable telephone numbers matches the ad that generated the call, and so, if for some reason the television ad was in fact failing to achieve its potential, the call tracking software would present the real cause for the sales increase. Without this information to hand, the ’sure-fire’ decision to the continued subsidy of the TV campaign would have been a costly mistake.

As we have seen, the advent of phone call analytics transforms the offline ‘blind spot’ into a resource for collecting valuable information on the progress of your marketing strategy. High revenue-achieving calls are made every day, and this software provides a valuable insight into the way in which customers interact with your company, where you need to concentrate marketing strategy, and how to go about doing so.

 

(*Source: A Nielsen/NetRatings and Webvisible survey: 2006, ComScore Google Study: March 2006)

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The Benefits of Phone Call Analytics Explained


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When detailing the benefits of phone call analytics with Google Analytics integration, it’s often easy to fall into the trap of either preaching to the converted who already comprehend why this service is a good thing, while failing to clarify exactly what phone call analytics is for people who are encountering it for the first time. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the process by which phone number tracking brings your company a significant increase in conversions and a greater degree of accuracy with your company’s offline ad campaigns.

In the most basic sense, phone call analytics allows a company to confidently track and adapt your offline advertising campaign, and also to interpret data to ensure that the great number of offline-originated calls end up in conversions, just as one might control online conversions using web analytics. There are many aspects to a phone call analytics system, and many levels on which the data can be integrated and applied in order to make active choices about an ad campaign. However, for the purposes of this article, the most self-evident benefits of website telephone tracking will be discussed. First of all, let’s look closer at how a company might use phone call analytics to monitor and adapt an ad campaign.

In a standard case of call tracking, the individual numbers generating calls are entered into the software so that they can be identified and the data from that specific number can be collected. For the entire call, the customer is entirely unaffected by the passing of the call through the software. Each call is recorded, and the advertising generating that call is logged as an individual piece of data distinguishable from other numbers in the same campaign. What this means is that numbers generating calls can be identified, and a company can quickly see which numbers are costing valuable advertising investment but are delivering no sales. Effectively, phone call analytics marks the end of wasted advertising investment that is being lost through the inability to track which conversions happen from which offline-generated calls.

A further grey-area of the awareness of a campaigns success is clarified with the implementation of phone call analytics - numbers that are generating calls but are failing to result in conversions can be identified and modified, and the reason for their poor performance can be quickly identified with minimal loss of advertising investment. This is a common experience in the optimization of an ad campaign; call analytics simply minimizes the loss of investment, and the time it takes to identify and neutralize these problems.

The implementation of call analytics provides the evidence you need on which to ground further decisions concerning your campaign; with call tracking, keywords generating conversions can be isolated from those failing to reach their potential - without call tracking, making potentially-costly decisions as to the performance of an offline ad campaign still holds an aspect of blind trust in the total performance (or lack thereof) of an individual campaign. For SEO workers, it is possible to prove to the client the validity of ad investment expenditure with exact statistics recorded in real time by the phone call analytics software. For an SEO, being able to prove just how work has benefited a client is becoming more and more necessary in order to stay competitive.

Call recording and e-mail notification for out-of-hours and missed calls translates into a huge amount of conversions that would simply be lost without the implementation of a call tracking solution. With a call analytics system, it is incredibly easy to follow up and recapture lost leads. As each call is logged and recorded, missed calls and out-of-hours calls no longer need to be a problem - many companies have been shocked to find the amount of missed calls and out-of-hours calls they have missed through a lack of call tracking software. Often with companies with very little manpower, a huge amount of conversions can be picked up by reorganizing work hours around peak times that were being missed unintentionally. Being able to recapture lost leads rescues a great amount of revenue and custom that would otherwise vanish without call tracking - whether a sale is £10 or £1000 per conversion, this aspect of call tracking is sure to dramatically boost your conversion ratio.

Hopefully this article has managed to explain in more detail the active benefits of phone call analytics, and various ways in which a call analytics system will serve to boost your conversion ratio. Though this article deals with the basic advantages of phone call analytics, the advent of Google Analytics integration with call tracking is currently huge news in the SEO/SEM sphere, so expect to hear a great deal more about the power of call tracking, whether you are an SEO worker, an online marketer, or are looking to develop your online sales presence.

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Call Tracking, Web Analytics and CRM: Combining Technology for Better Business


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One change that the economic downturn has brought about in the field of internet marketing is the increasing need for all aspects of your advertising strategy to be justified. In this article, we’ll look at a range of solutions geared towards tightening up your overall marketing success to an optimum level, ensuring at all times that you’re making the best decisions to push your business forward. The temptation for companies to panic themselves into a state of parsimoniousness with their advertising budget can prove fatal at this time, especially for fledgling businesses caught at the turn of the crisis - the key to success is to make the most of your ad budget, while safeguarding it as best as possible. The surest way of doing this is to utilize all the current technologies available.

In terms of business advantages, you wish to be able to obtain masses of data conducive to gaining an insight on the continued success of your ad campaigns. For your online activity, web analytics is the most powerful tool in allowing you to gain extensive data on your customer demographic and customer interaction with your website. With Google Analytics and Google AdWords, it is possible to analyse referrers, to highlight potentially confusing or counter-productive pages, and to identify trends in visitor’s landing pages to your website. This allows you to take control of your online marketing presence - no more tweaking and simply guessing as to whether your changes will produce results. This can prove to be a huge boost towards gaining conversions from your website traffic, and helps to sustain and expand upon one’s web presence confidently.

While your online conversion ratio is becoming tighter, there is still the problem of gaining any kind of interpretable data concerning offline calls and sales. A telephone lead is considered by many online marketers to be one of the most promising and most frequently-converting forms of lead there is. Up until fairly recently, a sophisticated way of interpreting and exploiting data in order to improve one’s ROI. call tracking rectifies this problem. By applying unique telephone numbers to your ad campaign, offline calls from printed ads, radio and TV can be interpreted down to a highly-specific level, down to numbers of calls, sales and leads, even sales amounts and an instant calculation of your ROI. Unproductive ads can be cut, and the budget re-allocated or re-deployed to form a positive, conversion-winning campaign. A call tracking system changes a previously tedious process of customer questioning and sales team badgering into an sophisticated, automated process - it is as powerful as its online web analytics counterpart. Call tracking also features call recording and lost-lead recapture, to ensure that the maximum amount of calls turn into sales through sales team training, and the ability to reconnect with customers failing to reach you through the telephone ad.

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution allows you to confidently acquire, retain, and extend custom. Once you have spent your advertising budget and have attracted customers, it is economically sound to learn as much about their needs as possible, as this makes further sales opportunities possible without the need for further ad budget expenditure. This is of course also incredibly healthy for your business image, as it helps to build a lasting relationship between the customer and your business or service. A properly implemented CRM solution ensures that the maximum amount of conversions can be made with no more than the necessary spend on budget. A database of customer purchases, the progress of a potential lead and so on helps to keep a pro-active approach to making conversions, instead of simply sitting back and doing nothing to encourage customers to buy.

In conclusion, being active and combining several internet marketing technologies seems to be the best option in pushing your business forward. Your ad budget is only useful when it’s being spent - with CRMs, web analytics and a phone number tracking system, you are simply able to ensure that this money is being spent in a manner most conducive to your continued business success. The current advancements in the sphere of intelligent analytics solutions means that you’ll hear a lot about the subject in the near future. Take some time to see for yourself how this technology will save your investment and boost your conversions.

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Call Tracking Systems Give Small Businesses a Grip During the Financial Crisis


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The current financial climate affords a chance to demonstrate a scenario in which call tracking can really sustain your business to keep on generating sales when it matters most. The reluctance of larger companies to concentrate funds on advertising need not be the herald of bad news for a business properly managing its existing advertising campaigns. For smaller businesses, a way of assuring one’s ability to exploit this opportunity would mean the difference between adopting a fatalistic attitude of the possibility of growth during the slump, or having the chance to really move forward as the bigger businesses relent. This is where call tracking comes in.

Call tracking allows you to break down information from any telephone all made through a printed ad campaign, providing your business with an insight into your advertising campaign’s success, and gives you the ability to manage data on your telephone ad campaign that has heretofore been unobtainable without the notoriously unreliable form of customer feedback. For people familiar with Google Analytics, one might say that call tracking is its counterpart in the management of a successful campaign in other areas than online sales. With phone call tracking, a small business can have a wealth of instant marketing feedback immediately to hand, allowing one to make confident, informed decisions as to the next step in furthering one’s overall success.

As an example of applied call tracking in order to ensure the optimum spending of one’s advertising budget, we could take one advertising campaign and break it down into its unique telephone numbers for printed ads, radio, etc.. Where the success of this campaign would usually be a holistic, grouped total, call tracking software allows us to dissect the campaign and to isolate areas in which the campaign is failing to reach its full potential, or to deploy further campaigns of a similar nature to a particularly successful one. This area of information on customer responsiveness and an individual campaign’s ROI has heretofore been a blind-spot in market research. Online call tracking solves the problem of analytics data missing from a business’s picture of its offline marketing strategy, and is intuitively designed to serve businesses with both elementary and advanced computer acumen.

In practical terms, a telephone call tracking system affords us the chance to competently understand the data returned on an advertising campaign in a rational, business-applicable sense. For example, it is extremely beneficial, especially for a business struggling to justify its advertising expenditure to be able to identify that a campaign generating fifty calls a day is in fact making very few or no sales; this is but one scenario in which call tracking uses marketing data to tighten one’s marketing strategy just by identifying weaknesses leading to a loss of conversions.

The nature of your offline ad campaign being essentially performance-based, call tracking affords your business a way of ensuring the capture of sales which collectively result in a steady increase of conversions made without further investment of your advertising budget. An example of this would be the e-mail notification system for calls made after business hours, allowing you to retrieve the number of the lost client – in this way, call tracking allows your business to generate sales and to get the most out of the performance you are putting into your campaign.

A call tracking system offers a solution to realizing the potential of your investment through the retrieval of informed, self-evident information on your campaigns and your customer trends. This is an incredibly cost-effective way of ensuring that everything possible is being done to give you a consummate understanding of the inner workings of your advertising campaigns, and really capture those leads which will determine your marketing success through these tough financial straits.

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Fresh Egg Launch Innovative Call Tracking for Google Analytics


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SEO and web analytics specialists Fresh Egg has developed a new conversion tracking application - CallTrackID™ - that enables telephone call tracking to be fully integrated with Google Analytics™. 
In addition to email enquiries and e-commerce sales, telephone calls can now also be tracked, accurately identifying the referrer source for those telephone calls and relating them back to the online marketing activity. This innovative tool will prove of gigantic value to marketers who, in the current credit crisis, are under huge pressure to effectively track and measure return on investment. CallTrackID™ additionally enables SEO agencies to finally prove that those sales calls are due to the Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) or organic SEO work carried out as part of an integrated marketing campaign.
The Fresh Egg team has spent a lot of months working with a telecoms provider to create CallTrackID™. The application itself was initiated by analytics guru Nikki Rae and the Fresh Egg programming team. “We always found it frustrating when we could not analyse the success of a telephone call as part of a traffic conversion report, when telephone enquiries are arguably the most valuable conversions of all.” Nikki said.

CallTrackID ™ works by allowing the client to assign a special telephone number for sales/ information enquiries depending on the visitor’s route to the site. This allows enquiries to be tracked from various traffic mediums, including visitors who have taken a direct route to the site, via organic search or those who have clicked on a PPC link. Each telephone call is routed through a call management system that joins the call number with the pre-defined income route. CallTrackID™ then integrates the telephone call information in Google Analytics™ along with existing web analytics reporting data, allowing the provision of reports and recommendations that relate precisely to a client’s total online marketing activity.

Media Contact:
Katie Ollerenshaw
Fresh Egg Public Relations
Tel: 01444 241341
Email: katie@aneelarosepr.co.uk

Regarding Fresh Egg:
Fresh Egg is an award-winning web design and internet marketing agency specialising in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Established in 2000 and based in Worthing, West Sussex, the company has around 25 members of staff and was founded by Adam Stafford, Philippa Stafford and Lee Colbran. As from March 2009, serial entrepreneur and BBC Dragon James Caan has invested in Fresh Egg through his private equity firm Hamilton Bradshaw and assumed the role of Chairman of a company he clearly sees has a great future.

Fresh Egg offers a range of online marketing services including Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click advertising, email marketing, blogging, campaign microsites, content management and content production. The businesses web design and dev team are able to create a range of stunning websites, all built to be as ‘attractive’ to search engines as possible. The company produced the website for The Sanctuary Spa, awarded ‘website of the week’ by New Media Age magazine.

Various Fresh Egg clients are Norwich Union, Liberty, The Sanctuary Spa, Mankind, Beauty Expert, Nationwide Vehicle Contracts, Tropical Sky, Dial-a-phone, Richard John, Model Zone and the Independent Schools Council. http://www.freshegg.com.

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