Keyword call tracking is available to track organic and paid calls at the keyword level but does anyone have a need for this? Is there any interest in knowing which keywords are producing phone calls for your business and further more can the analytics data from this tracking help to shape your marketing/advertising?
Are you pitching phone call tracking service or asking for dialog/input? I'm in the hospitality industry, 80% of the people that book for the hotels I run PPC for, do so over the phone. My theory is for small local businesses, especially one like hotels where inventory is constantly changing, and if you book for a week you're talking about a $500-600 purchase, they are going to call - might get a better deal, or they just feel more confident talking to a human and it's not like they are calling a big company like Marriot, so there is an element of trust. There's a lot of companies that set up phone tracking, Mongoose Metrics being the most well known from what I gather. Their stuff is pretty impressive, from a basic tracking to "voice analytics" where they analyze the call audio recordings for key words related to your business "my credit card number is...." to determine within a statistical probably how likely the call resulted in a conversion. The more advanced you want, the more you are going to pay. I think the basic solution I looked at was like $20 bucks a month, per number. While $20 bucks a month sounds reasonable, I'm going to need at least 4 numbers to make it work with the number of ad groups I'm running with each hotel. That's adding 80 bucks a month to a campaign for a hotel where my client is only spending about $500/month. I really want to do it, just to try it, but it's not my money either so I'm running into resistance. Mongoose also locks you into a year long contract. I tried to negotiate with them on the year long contract but they wouldn't budge. I could have sworn I saw a document somewhere that showed you how to set up phone call tracking manually with javascript - basically display dynamic content based on the keywords etc. You can get phone numbers really cheap that simply route the calls to the main line but they will give you a report on how many- I think Google Voice you can get numbers for free? Skype like $2 a month. I can't find the PDF though. If anybody knows how to do this please chime in.
Nope, not trying to pitch call tracking service. I was actually trying to find out how useful it is for marketers to find out which keywords are generating phone calls from PPC and SEO. Basically a potential customer enters your site/landing page and based on the keyword they typed a number is inserted. Then you can see which number is getting phone calls and what the duration of the calls are. Mongoose actually sounds like a different system than the one I was talking about, but the reason I brought it up was because a company I used to work for just recently released the service but I was questioning whether there was a use for it or not. Sounds useful but only for certain industries just like Mongoose's system. Thanks for the information though, it really gives me a better idea of what the software is being used for.
Yeah sorry I was sort of vague- Mongoose's high end service records every call and tracks keywords. I believe the service is Accutrack. They use dynamic number generation so that they can track the keyword, the actual recording of the call, whether it converted online or not, and with the voice analytics it listens to the audio for you and tells you whether it converted on the phone. Of course the pricing was really high for that service. I don't remember the exact figures but it was like, twice my total budget for Adwords haha. Yeah it sounded great, but it's 2010, not 2005 - I have to show my employer scientific/historical evidence something is going to work before they plunk down a credit card.
By the way I did find a blog post that gave a more DIY option when it comes to phone call tracking where you do the scripts yourself. http://www.seoverflow.com/call-tracking/roll-your-own-phone-call-tracking-program-it-is-easy Would love to hear from someone that actually sets this up.
Hosted Numbers provides call tracking services. You can get a local or toll free virtual phone number and forward incoming calls to another telephone number. You get detailed usage call reports which can be emailed to you on a scheduled interval. Conversations can optionally be recorded and recordings can also be sent to your inbox. You can also configure integration with Google Analytics.
Call tracking is vital to undrstand which keywords are making the telephone ring - Google has just launched call tracking for their PPC accounts so it must be needed!