At Marchex, we specialize in digital advertising solutions for small businesses. Over the years, we have learned a lot about the needs of our small business customers and we’ve spent a significant amount of time monitoring and measuring how changing digital advertising trends and consumer adoption of new devices, like smartphones, impact the way small businesses sell products and services.

Today, the proliferation of smartphones and mobile devices provide consumers with immediate access to business information no matter where they are in relation to their needs.

Whether it’s a coffee shop within walking distance or a car repair business several miles away – or anything in between – consumers use their mobile devices to search for relevant business information and easily place a call for more details.

Timeliness of information makes the mobile audience ripe with intent to buy, and small businesses need to learn how to best reach this audience and optimize their advertising spend to drive better return on investment.

Small business customers often search for business listings and then call for directions, hours of operation, product or service availability, reservations, pricing and more. Odds are you don’t know if your callers came in from a search engine, or other online referral source such as local listings or location-based mobile applications.

But, chances are high that you are measuring click through rates or form fill responses from these digital advertising placements. If so, that’s fantastic! But, you might be missing out on a big chunk of your ROI story: Offline conversions that are driven though online campaigns.

To further elaborate on this point, I’d like to share a real-world example from which we can all learn.

A home services business with several local locations needed to understand exactly how much traffic their search campaigns drove in the form of phone calls.

Despite custom SEO and search engine marketing strategies developed by a search consultancy, the home services business received a minimal amount of form fill outs from its website, and needed to determine if search marketing was still a viable and cost-effective lead generation tool.

Although the business was seeing a strong uptick in phone calls, the increase in calls could not be directly attributed to its online campaigns. Since phone calls are critical to this business’s success, there was a desire to know for sure how the calls were being generated.

Tracking offline conversions from search campaigns is more cumbersome than measuring clicks, but it also tells a bigger, more powerful story about the end-to-end impact of search campaigns and helps small businesses better manage their budgets.

Tracking Offline Conversions In A Cost-Effective Manner

After scouring the market for a way to easily, cost-effectively, and accurately attribute search engine marketing campaigns to offline phone calls, the home services business selected a call analytics solution. The  technology allowed the business to assign unique call tracking numbers to each of its search marketing campaigns, landing pages, and local websites as well as leverage an easy to use call analytics system to measure results.

Contrary to what you might think, a call tracking and analytics program can be affordable for businesses of all sizes, and especially for local businesses, it can pay dividends in terms of the type of information provided.

It didn’t take long to determine that a majority of search-driven website visitors picked up the phone for more information instead of filling out the online form. The business was able to understand which search engines and keywords drove more calls and whether callers discovered the home services locations through paid or organic listings.

This level of detail proved to be especially helpful for this business, which, like many small and local businesses, relies heavily on cost-effective direct response advertising to drive leads. If you understand exactly where the traffic comes from, and how that traffic turns into calls, then optimizing for best results across your online marketing campaigns becomes much easier and more effective.

Actionable Results

After monitoring campaign data for six months, a clear, consistent trend emerged: On average, 71% of the home services business’s search engine-generated conversions came in over the telephone versus only 29% from the online form. That’s a pretty big delta, and it’s proof that using a call tracking and analytics solution is well worth the effort.

In fact, call tracking and analytics brought a level of clarity to this business that led them to realize their search marketing return on investment was significantly higher than first thought. And, they determined they were under bidding on top-performing keywords.

By gradually increasing their bid prices until they reached a sweet spot in bid/conversion return on investment, the advertiser was able to achieve a 100% improvement in lead totals.

Bottom Line Impact

With call tracking and analytics this local business experienced exceptional results.

• It was discovered that a full 85% of search engine-generated conversions came in via phone, and only 15% came in via the online form – a key learning that allowed the advertiser to maximize exposure with its allotted online marketing budget.
• The number of search engine-generated leads more than doubled year-over-year.
• The number of traceable leads delivered increased a whopping 100% after the business began using call tracking and analytics software.

The Moral Of The Story

Clicks and website activity don’t tell the whole story when it comes to search engine marketing for small and local businesses. You don’t have to be a large corporation with a large budget to benefit from a call tracking and analytics solution.

In fact, if you’re not tracking the impact of your search engine marketing efforts past the click, you could be missing out on a significant source of leads and conversions.

Enter pay-for-call.

For those new to Pay-For-Call (PFC), it is a performance-based advertising medium that delivers qualified customer inquiries to advertisers via the telephone.  PFC utilizes a variety of advertising distribution channels, such as search engines, Internet yellow pages, directories, vertical web sites or increasingly, mobile sources, to reach an advertiser’s target audience with call-focused advertisements.  Phrases like “call for more information” or “call now” are used to encourage the visitor to take action and place a call to the advertising business.  Following are some examples of the types of businesses that are most likely to benefit from PFC:

  What truly distinguishes PFC from simply a call-focused advertisement is the ability to track the specific distribution outlet that resulted in the phone call.  Every PFC advertiser can have a unique phone number for each method of distribution that is directly traced back to the advertisement.  This allows for accurate reporting of the number of phone calls delivered to the advertiser and allows the advertiser to track the new leads entering his business.  All phone numbers used in the campaign are directed to the advertiser’s business line or local office, which creates a seamless experience for the caller and advertiser. 

In addition to the new customers that PFC can deliver to a business, it can also offer detailed reporting.  Advanced PFC providers offer reporting that may include caller phone number, including missed phone call numbers, call time, call length, caller location and number of calls. Some providers offer optional call recording, which can be used to monitor the quality of the phone conversation and call itself. The recordings can also serve as a powerful tool and focus group for some businesses.

PFC is characterized as a performance-based advertising medium because the advertiser only pays when the viewer takes a desired action—in this case places a call.  Typically, a call will need to have a minimum duration of time in order to be billed.  Common minimum billable call lengths range from 10-15 seconds.  Additionally, PFC providers usually only charge for new customer phone calls and will not charge for repeat phone calls within a specific period of time.  

Why is pay-for-call important now?

Early on, PFC proved successful for only certain business types.  Dating services, insurance, lending and other business industries that naturally tend to generate customer inquiries via telephone, effectively utilized PFC to develop new customer relationships.  However, for businesses with increased competition for calls, PFC providers did not have advertisement distribution broad enough to cover a diverse range of business categories and therefore struggled to fulfill their advertisers’ budgets and deliver the desired amount of call-based leads. 

Today, the problems that once constrained PFC are being overcome by certain providers. As a result, PFC is reemerging as a powerful tool for local businesses across a broad range of business categories.  Increased consumer use of the Internet and Internet-enabled mobile devices, allows an opportunity for PFC providers to cost-effectively connect businesses with consumers that are interested in placing a phone call related to a product or service.  Consumers’ increased use of local search via mobile Internet is a perfect example of how greater call volumes can now be generated. According to The Kelsey Group’s Mike Boland, we can expect to see growth from 54.5 million mobile Web users to 63.6-73 million in 2009 alone, with growth of handsets from 266.4 million to 274.7 million.  It is also expected that searches for local information at 27.8 percent in 2008 will to grow to 35.1 percent by 2013 (source: The Kelsey Group, Annual Forecast: Mobile Local Media, February 2009).

Ultimately, what this means is that more consumers are using and will continue to use mobile Internet to search for local information.  The increased amount of consumer attention for local information through the use of a mobile device provides a clear emerging avenue for PFC providers.  It is through this activity that Pay-For-Call is increasingly driving new business and relationships for businesses of all sizes.