Bridging the gap between the online and offline world poses challenges when using paid search to drive calls.
Most search marketers want the same things from their PPC campaigns: increase conversions and decrease cost per conversion. Things get a little more complicated when the goal of your PPC spend is to drive calls to your business.
Using PPC to drive calls is a common tactic in any considered purchasing category where the cost of the product or service tends to exceed $5000 and the stakes are high.
Financial services, insurance, travel, and home delivery are just a few of the industries where conversions frequently occur over the phone, and marketers invest a lot of time and money to attract the most enthusiastic buyers.
In fact, one company (Invoca) surveyed banking customers and found that 93 percent of consumers who took out a loan of $100,000 or more made at least one call while evaluating options.
The problem is that there are many potential pitfalls for marketers driving leads across channels, particularly online to offline, digital to phone.
Here are five of the most common mistakes search marketers make when driving calls with PPC.
Conduct support calls with marketing budget
This question keeps many search advertisers up at night: “What happens if I spend thousands of dollars of our paid search budget directing calls to the support call center?” It happens more often than you think. When someone who needs help searches for your business on Google, call the first number you see. What could be the number in your paid search ad that is supposed to generate conversions, not support calls?
If you're worried about the expense of handling those calls, keep this in mind: For companies that are considered buy-side industries, bidding on high-value keywords like “life insurance” can drive prices to $50 or more. per click.
Not only does this mean that the marketing team is taking a big financial hit, but it also has a negative impact on the customer experience because their calls are also going to the wrong place. They then have to be transferred or call a new number for help. This annoys customers. the marketing budget is burned and everyone loses.
To put this in perspective, a leading US insurer that recently implemented Invoca's call intelligence solution found that more than 50 percent of inbound calls driven by paid search were support inquiries, not sales opportunities.
To avoid this scenario, you need to break down the call center marketing data silo. Marketing should be able to act on call tracking data now, not a month from now.
The best way to do this is by leveraging advanced artificial intelligence and natural language understanding (NLU) technology to accelerate and digitize the feedback loop between the contact center and marketing teams.
Instead of listening to calls manually, marketing can leverage real-time voice analytics, automatically understand caller behavior and intent, and integrate those insights into digital advertising platforms.
This shared data set establishes a foundation for better cooperation between marketing and contact center teams.
Don't design ads to direct calls
Simply display a phone number in a paid search ad not enough to generate calls that generate conversions. In addition to siled data, poor ad design is one of the most common reasons your PPC generates low-quality calls.
To design paid search ads that drive high-decision buyers to call, start by using language in your ads that makes it clear why they should call. For example, if you are an HVAC installer and your goal is to get more estimate appointments, say “Call now for a free in-home estimate!” If you are a mortgage broker trying to give more rate quotes, say “Call for a quote without risk rate today.”
Casting a wide net will only help you catch bad calls. Remember that with call ads you only have two lines of description and a URL to work with and no title. Focus on making your copy concise and aligned with your goals. To get more out of the space, you can also use the URL to display a call to action or other information.
Poorly optimizing campaigns for calls
This seems obvious, but you have to remember that digital campaigns that drive calls require a different approach than campaigns that generate clicks. Explore the reports and see the top keywords that are driving phone calls.
To make sure you're looking for high-quality calls, don't just count the number of calls. Watch qualifiers such as call duration to reduce conversions, then optimize your bids to ensure the keywords that generate the most quality calls rank highest.
Additionally, you may want to consider increasing your PPC spend. Keep in mind that calls convert at 10x the click rate and are typically much more valuable conversions. More spending on your calling campaigns could be worth the additional investment.
Losing in rush hours
Call volume for most businesses fluctuates throughout the day and night. People probably won't be asking for a mortgage quote at 2am on Saturday, but they will be turning on their phones at 9am on Monday. Analyze call data in Google AdWords, Google Analytics, or a third-party tool to find out the peak days and times for phone calls.
Then, confirm that these are quality calls from prospects. This can be done by looking at call duration or using a call intelligence platform to get deep conversation analysis so you know exactly what's happening on every call. From there, you can increase your bid modifiers to ensure your calling ads appear at those times.
No visibility on calls
How long does it take your marketing organization to get actionable data from a call? One week? One month? Never? This is the biggest blind spot many digital marketers who need to handle calls face.
They spend a lot of money on paid searches to drive calls, but the second a customer disconnects from the phone, has no idea what's going on, or days or weeks go by before they get data to fill in the blanks. Which, in your world, might as well be a decade.
While you may eventually be able to check the box for that conversion to be driven by a digital campaign, you probably don't have keyword data and have nothing to work with with retargeting.
That means you could be wasting budget on ads and keywords that don't work, turning off ones that do, and wasting money on retargeting customers who've already converted on the phone. Not only is this bad for your marketing budget, but it's a bad experience for your customers.
