Track, rack and stack: Monitoring your PPC data

Your pay-per-call (PPC) marketing campaign has your phones ringing off the hook, and that’s keeping your sales staff hopping. Now you need to rack and stack the results to analyze which ads and keywords are producing the best return on investment. If you’re new to PPC, you might need help interpreting all that valuable data.

Mobile call volume to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is expected to reach 65 billion this year, according to Stephanie Miles in StreetFightMag.com.

“Call-monetization platforms have grown in popularity,” she adds. “The downside … is that many SMBs are starting call-monetization campaigns without completely understanding how to take advantage of the platforms they’re using.”

Fortunately, today’s software can do the heavy lifting for you, compiling data at reasonable costs. The immediacy of that information allows for quick revisions to the parts of your advertising that are and are not working — everything from interactive voice response to key performance indicators and ad placements.

Industry professionals offer the following tips to help you effectively track and evaluate your PPC campaign:

– Start calculating ROI (and monitoring your budget) as soon as possible by immediately assigning a monetary value to call conversions, even if estimating average sales figures.

– Immediately filter and block invalid calls with an automated tool so you receive real and valid leads. Today’s intuitive software can track details like caller demographics, email notifications for select calls and other features that help you fine tune your campaign. CallView360 offers customizable menus and graphs that take unfiltered switch-level data and compile it into helpful information like cost per call, cost per lead, ROI, call patterns, selling patterns, close rates and average order value per call center.

– Consider a software that allows you to record and easily play back calls. Doing so provides invaluable insight on how to train employees, maximize their skill sets and increase closing rates, ensuring you’re taking care of customers and maximizing your revenue.

– Take full advantage of call extensions and mobile click-to-calls.

– Use call-duration and call-recording technology to assess the quality of calls from specific locations.

– Consistently measure online conversions and monitor other marketing channels to compare results and maximize total ROI.

Once you get the hang of interpreting your data, customizing your PPC campaign to your needs should be much easier.

In Forbes, Larry Myler predicts inbound calls from potential customers will reach 70 billion nationwide in 2018.

“Your inbound call is not only a marketer’s most valuable asset, for many offerings it should be the end goal of the entire marketing strategy,” he says. “As our society becomes increasingly more mobile in the use of technology, migrating from searching for an offering online to contacting the company by phone will become increasingly seamless, more convenient and the most viable bridge between initial interest and final purchase.”