Do eager prospects ever visit your website then call your sales team to learn more? If your answer is yes, at some point, you may have wondered how to measure a phone call as a conversion. While Web analytics tools track online conversions, you may also need a call tracking tool to measure phone calls as an offline conversion event.

What’s the best way to evaluate and configure a call tracking solution? The answer depends on what you are trying to accomplish by tracking phone leads.

Here are the four most common reasons online marketers implement a call tracking solution:

1. Get full credit for leads
2. Increase lead flow by A/B testing
3. Optimize ad spend
4. Measure ROI

For each objective, there is an optimal way to structure your call tracking solution. This article will walk through each of those scenarios.

Get Full Credit For All Leads You Generate Via PPC

Let’s say you’re an agency that needs to prove you are worth your fee. Your goal is to show your client at the end of each month how many leads your SEM efforts generate. You just need to show that what you’re doing works.

If that’s the case, all you really need is one call tracking number. You assign that number to all PPC traffic. When paid search visitors arrive on your website, you display the unique call tracking number.

You then use reporting to determine the aggregate number of leads you generate, and leverage that report to get full credit for the results you deliver. Pretty simple.

Increase Lead Flow By Running A/B Tests

If you’re working on a conversion optimization project and want to determine the most effective landing page design, then perhaps an A/B test is your primary goal. In that scenario, you simply need one unique phone number per variation.

If you test a new design against an original, you’ll need just two unique call tracking numbers. If you test three variations on 10 different landing pages, you’ll want 30 unique phone numbers. Again, pretty simple.

Optimize Ad Spend

This is where call tracking gets interesting. If your primary goal is to optimize ad spend, you need to have a fairly granular understanding of which keywords drive leads. You’ll want a call tracking solution with “dynamic phone number” capabilities so that you can track conversions to the keyword level without needing to buy a unique phone number for each keyword.

The way this works is that you buy enough phone numbers so that at any given time each visitor sees a unique number. The software matches unique visitors to unique calls, and pushes keyword level reporting data into Google Adwords. This enables you to create business rules for phone conversions and bid based on CPA instead of CPC.

Measure Return On Investment

While measuring phone leads can be critical to an effective online marketing campaign, you may want to understand which sources generate revenue, not just a phone leads.

For example, it’s possible that one group of keywords generates a high volume of calls but minimal revenue, while another group of keywords generates fewer calls but greater revenue.

In this scenario, you’ll want a call tracking tool that allows you to track which calls turn into clients and how much those clients spend. You can then use this data to bid based on revenue generated via phone leads, not just quantity of phone leads.

Overall, it’s important to consider your primary PPC goals when choosing and implementing a call tracking solution. In some cases, a basic solution with just one unique number is enough.

In other situations, you’ll need many numbers and more advanced tools. Ultimately, you need to make sure your call tracking solution is as simple and cost-effective as possible, yet as a robust and granular as necessary.

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