Call Gap: Survey Finds 54 Percent Of Search Marketers Don’t Track Phone Conversions From Search Campaigns

How important are offline phone calls to search marketers?

Google has reported that 70 percent of mobile searchers have called a business directly from search results. BIA/Kelsey estimates inbound phone calls from mobile search will grow from roughly 40 billion this year to 70 billion in 2016.

Yet despite these trends, many marketers aren’t keeping up with consumer’s changing call habits.

In a new survey of 132 search marketers conducted by call marketing automation firm, Invoca, just 36 percent of respondents said they are using call extensions or click-to-call ads in their search campaigns.

Maybe phone calls aren’t an important part of the other 64 percent of marketers’ sales strategies? It doesn’t appear that way: 63 percent of those surveyed said that phone leads are as valuable or more valuable than web conversions.

Then there are the sizable number of marketers which are still in the dark about the value of their call conversions and search’s impact on driving calls.

Over half (54 percent) of respondents said they don’t track when search campaigns convert offline from phone calls. Nearly 1 in 5 said they didn’t know how the value of inbound-call conversions compares to web conversions. Web conversions were considered more valuable than phone calls conversions by just 17 percent of respondents.

If calls aren’t tracked back to the search campaigns that drove them — and search marketers don’t know the value of those call conversions that came through — there are clearly going to be attribution problems. Appropriate budgets may not be allocated and bids not optimized as a result of search campaigns losing out on credit for the inbound calls they drive.

Nearly a third (31 percent) of the search marketers polled said their marketing team gets no credit for driving inbound calls.