For many companies, regardless of the revenue of online sales, offline calls comprise a solid core of the overall conversion ratio. The generally-agreed total of calls made offline which were generated through an online search is around 43%*. When these calls are highly valuable in terms of revenue, there is an immediate problem in tallying these sales along with your online ones to determine ROI and your marketing efficiency.

This often happens in areas like the travel industry: it is to be expected that, for larger sales amounts which require more commitment from the customer, the customer will often opt to contact a sales advisor over the phone to close the deal. When you think that such a vast percentage of sales are conducted through this method, it has to be understood that, without the ability to analyze the ad source for these sales, there is no way to assess the performance of the overall campaign, nor determine a working ROI.

Call tracking software is the solution to this problem. Given the make-up of such an industry’s total revenue, this allows the expansion of sales and leads tracking into the heretofore ‘blind’ area of offline calls generated online, and a deeper knowledge of the performance of newspaper, radio and television advertising. With the emergence of telephone conversion tracking, this huge grey area of the marketing picture is filled in with incredible detail.

The data retrieved using call analytics is essentially of a purely practical nature, and serves to empower action made to the upkeep of a marketing campaign. The marketing budget of any business is often proportionally relative – with a smaller company, it is especially precious; with an established business it is no less indispensable because there is more of it. Being able to streamline and conserve even 10% would be a massive improvement of marketing efficiency, and as individual ad campaign numbers can be identified and confidently supplemented or reduced, the level of specificity to which you think you need to rise in your conservation of budget is entirely in your hands.

Imagine, for example, that your new television advert has just cost you a more than sizeable chunk of your ad budget. Sales increase, and so, happily, you consider to continue the ad, or even to expand on it, moving to a more popular channel at a more popular showing time. In reality, the decision to pump more budget into this campaign is not as practical or sure-footed as it seems; it could even be that the ad is failing miserably in achieving justifiable ROI, and the sales peak is being generated by discrete from the TV ad.

With a call tracking solution, the doubt and the element of risk is eliminated. A system of identifiable telephone numbers matches the ad that generated the call, and so, if for some reason the television ad was in fact failing to achieve its potential, the call tracking software would present the real cause for the sales increase. Without this information to hand, the ’sure-fire’ decision to the continued subsidy of the TV campaign would have been a costly mistake.

As we have seen, the advent of phone call analytics transforms the offline ‘blind spot’ into a resource for collecting valuable information on the progress of your marketing strategy. High revenue-achieving calls are made every day, and this software provides a valuable insight into the way in which customers interact with your company, where you need to concentrate marketing strategy, and how to go about doing so.

(*Source: A Nielsen/NetRatings and Webvisible survey: 2006, ComScore Google Study: March 2006)

When detailing the benefits of phone call analytics with Google Analytics integration, it’s often easy to end up preaching to the converted, while failing to properly define in practical terms what the technology of phone call analytics actually does. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the process by which phone number tracking brings your company a significant increase in conversions and a greater degree of accuracy with your company’s offline ad campaigns.

In the most basic sense, phone call analytics allows a company to confidently track and adapt your offline advertising campaign, and also to interpret data to ensure that the great number of offline-originated calls end up in conversions, just as one might control online conversions using web analytics. There are many aspects to a phone call analytics system, and many levels on which the data can be integrated and applied in order to make active choices about an ad campaign. However, in the case of this article, the most apparent benefits of website telephone tracking will be discussed. First of all, let’s explain how a company might use phone call analytics to monitor and adapt an ad campaign.

In a standard case of call tracking, the individual numbers generating calls are entered into the software so that they can be identified and the data from that specific number can be collected. For the entire call, the customer is entirely unaffected by the passing of the call through the software. Each call is recorded, and the advertising generating that call is logged as an individual piece of data providing a range of information about the call itself and its relation to a trend of phone calls to your company. What this means is that numbers generating calls can be identified, and a company can quickly see which numbers are costing valuable advertising investment but are delivering no sales. Effectively, phone call analytics marks the end of wasted advertising investment that is being lost through the inability to track which conversions happen from which offline-generated calls.

A further grey-area of the awareness of a campaigns success is clarified with the implementation of phone call analytics – numbers that are generating calls but are failing to result in conversions can be identified and modified, and important changes to a campaign can be made swiftly and with minimal loss of advertising investment. This is a common experience in the optimization of an ad campaign; call analytics simply minimizes the loss of investment, and the time it takes to identify and neutralize these problems.

The implementation of call analytics provides the evidence you need on which to ground further decisions concerning your campaign; with call tracking, keywords generating conversions can be distinguished from those failing to reach their potential – without call tracking, making potentially-costly decisions as to the performance of an offline ad campaign is not without this element of risk and guess-work. For SEO workers, call analytics makes it possible to prove to the client the validity of ad investment expenditure with exact statistics recorded in real time by the phone call analytics software. For an SEO, being able to prove just how work has benefited a client is becoming more and more necessary in order to stay competitive.

Call recording and e-mail notification for out-of-hours and missed calls translates into a huge amount of conversions that would simply be lost without the implementation of a call tracking solution. With a call analytics system, it is incredibly easy to follow up and recapture lost leads. As each call is logged and recorded, missed calls and out-of-hours calls no longer need to be a problem – many companies have been shocked to find the amount of missed calls and out-of-hours calls they had been unable to pick up. Often with companies with very little manpower, a huge amount of conversions can be picked up by reorganizing work hours around peak times that were being missed unintentionally. Being able to recapture lost leads rescues a great amount of revenue and custom that would otherwise vanish without call tracking – whether a sale is £10 or £1000 per conversion, this aspect of call tracking is sure to dramatically boost your conversion ratio.

Hopefully this article has managed to explain in more detail the active benefits of phone call analytics, and various ways in which a call analytics system will serve to boost your conversion ratio. Though this article deals with the basic advantages of phone call analytics, the advent of Google Analytics integration with call tracking is currently huge news in the SEO/SEM sphere, so expect to hear a great deal more about the power of call tracking, whether you are an SEO worker, an online marketer, or are looking to develop your online sales presence.