In a previous article, I talked about using targeted paid search to drive phone calls to your business. It is one of the most direct methods that you can use to generate quality phone leads. Now, we discuss using trackable phone numbers to measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts. This works for paid search (PPC), promotions on your site or direct mail. The idea is simple:
- Get some custom phone numbers
- Make those number available in your advertising
- Track how many calls you get
The easiest way to get unique, flexible phone numbers is to get them through Google Voice. For owners that live in large cities, getting a number with a specific area code may or may not be possible. So, if you need a specific area code you might have to get numbers through another source. For those of us in smaller cities, grab a phone number for each type of advertising medium that you want to use. It’s not a necessity but having these numbers allows you to see what efforts are leading to results.
Next you are going to use these number in your marketing vehicles. Let’s just say that you are going to do a PPC campaign. Use your shiny new number in the ad and have the number forward to you cell or land line of choice. You can even set up voicemail to suit your business needs. Please be aware of one important gotcha. You should never use these numbers in online directories or your Google business page. For all these types of directories, you need to make sure that each listing that you have is EXACTLY the same. I mean down to punctuation and capitalization and above all, the same phone number. This number must be your main line. Do no use one phone number here, another there or your organic local seo will suffer.
Tracking Trackable Phone Numbers
Finally, we need a way to track your results. Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter will do this for you by setting up phone clicks as goals. For email marketing, services like Constant Contact and Mail Chimp can add tracking to linked phone numbers. For print marketing, you’ll have to rely on call logs from Google voice or whatever service you decide on. Finally, to use a custom phone number for a promotion on your site, you’ll need to add some code to the phone number link that fires an event in Google Analytics. This isn’t too bad as there are tutorials all over the net on this subject but Tenon SEM can help you in this regard.
We hope this article has piqued your interest in using trackable phone numbers in your marketing. For more info on how this is done, don’t hesitate to ring us at (864) 399-7920 and see how we can get your telephone call tracking up to speed.