Derek Andersen — August 17, 2018 — August 17, 2018
janeb13 / Pixabay
Google Ads — recently rebranded from Google AdWords — is a powerful, but extremely competitive digital advertising platform enabling marketers to run search, display, and video ad campaigns. In Q4 of 2017, the average CPC (cost per click) for Google Ads spiked by 14%. With nearly three-quarters of Google Ads marketers planning to increase their spend in the future, the pressure is rising for marketers to not only prove — but optimize — the ROI of their efforts.
It’s easy to quantify the online results of Google Ad campaigns through the platform’s robust marketing reports. But what happens when someone engages with your ad campaigns and converts by calling — are you able to capture that interaction? Not having accurate offline data on calls can be problematic, since Google Ads drives millions of calls to businesses every day. The disconnect between the online and offline customer journey makes it difficult to prove the full ROI of your ad spend and optimize your messaging, targeting, and bid strategies to generate more customers at a lower CPL.
Marketers who pass call data into Google Ads receive a holistic view of their campaign results, allowing them to make smarter optimizations in an increasingly competitive landscape. Below, we breakdown all the advantages of adding call data to your Google Ads accounts.
1. Make Smarter Optimizations to Increase Your Google Ads ROI
With the help of a call analytics solution, Google Ads marketers can quantify how many calls each of their Google Ads campaigns, ads, keywords, and targeting strategies are driving. And, in addition to understanding the sheer volume of calls, you can also drill deeper to understand the lead quality of these calls and their outcome of the conversation. Using this information, you can optimize bid strategies, audience targeting, and messaging for what drives the most business — online and over the phone.
For instance, let’s say you’re a car insurance company, and you allocate your budget to “cheap car insurance” and “auto insurance quote” keywords. The online conversion data shows that “cheap car insurance” is the more effective keyword — it’s CPL was $ 40. “Auto insurance quote,” on the other hand, had a CPL of $ 55. Bearing these results in mind, you would allocate more spend to the “cheap car insurance” keyword.
Continuing with the example, let’s say you pass your call data into Google Ads. When calls are added to your existing click data, you’re able to see the full results of your campaigns. “Cheap car insurance” now has a CPL of $ 35, and “auto insurance quote” has a CPL of $ 28. In addition, when analyzing the quality of calls driven by each campaign, you discover the calls driven by the “cheap car insurance” keyword convert to customers at a low rate, while the calls driven by the “auto insurance quote” keyword are driving much more business. Clearly, this call data would fundamentally alter your bidding strategy — “auto insurance quote” is the true top-performing keyword. By allocating more spend to “auto insurance quote,” you would greatly increase your ROI.
2. Detect and Correct Issues that Negatively Impact Your ROI
In a recent DT University study, we found 1 in 5 calls driven by paid search goes to voicemail. This is a troubling statistic, especially considering how much spend marketers are investing in Google Ads.
To mitigate this issue, and other negatively affecting your ROI, you should also analyze how calls driven by your Google Ads are handled. Analyzing voice interactions between consumers and your agents/locations enables you to see how many calls go to voicemail, what time the best leads come in, if agents/locations are following the right scripts to win business, who the highest (and lowest) performing agents/locations are, and more.
Using this data, you can update your sales scripts, provide additional coaching to underperforming agents, staff your locations more efficiently, and determine a set of best practices to implement across your organization. By ensuring your sales teams and locations are fully equipped to handle the calls your campaigns are generating, you can maximize the ROI of your Google Ads.
3. Use What Happens on Calls to Improve Your Targeting
With Google Ads spend and competition rising, it’s never been more important to target the right person with the right ad at the right time. To stay competitive in this environment — and allocate your budget as effectively as possible — you should analyze the results of your inbound calls and use that first-party data to improve your Google Ads targeting.
If your business fails to convert a caller, you can use the intelligence from that conversation to retarget them with a relevant Google Ad — perhaps offering a discount or special offer. If a caller converts to a customer, you can target them with an upsell campaign to entice them to upgrade their product or service. Alternatively, if there’s no opportunity for an upsell, you can exclude the converted caller to avoid wasting spend. Finally, you can put callers who converted into lookalike campaigns so you can find similar audiences to target with Google Ads that are proven to work.
To learn more Google Ads best practices and view case studies, download our Big Book of Call Tracking Success Stories.
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