Call Tracking Reveals Real ROI

There's no question the Internet has allowed forced businesses to take a hard look at their return on investment for every marketing dollar spent. Unlike print or television ads that are sometimes difficult to track as far as direct ROI, if a business spends money on an Internet campaign, the ROI is fairly transparent. Hypothetically:

We spent $1,000 on our pay-per-click campaign last month, which generated 700 site visits, five of whom booked a room online, 15 others filled out a contact form and two of those people eventually booked after followup calls. Seven bookings for total revenue of $4,900.

Spend $1,000, get $4,900 back. The math is pretty easy.

But is that campaign getting sold short? Probably.

What about everyone who called? If 1% of the visitors from that ad campaign thought the product was good enough to book, at least a few others probably disconnected from their keyboard and picked up the phone, right?

And there's the the Internet marketing ROI gap.

While it's not brand new technology, many businesses continue to overlook the Web-to-phone-to-lead conversions, and in doing so may inadvertently put the brakes on campaigns that, although not successful as far as online conversions, knock it out of the park if the call conversions are taken into account.

Most businesses have unique phone numbers for their Web sites. This is the same tracking process used for decades to see if that print or television ad worked.

But this is the Internet — we're literally connected — so let's take it a step further with "dynamic" numbers. Here's how it works: A little code here and there and that user who comes to the site from the PPC campaign will see a different phone number throughout his session than say someone who reached the site through an email campaign.

Suddenly, rather than 20 leads and seven conversions, we're looking at another 15 phone calls and 4 more conversions. Suddenly our ROI jumped from $4,900 to $7,700 dollars.

Granted, the revenue was always there, but now we know how we got it. If you'd like to know more about how to implement phone tracking into your internet marketing initiatives, don't hesitate to contact us today.

– Sean Kelly
Director of Managed Services