Imagine you were trying to catch a sailfish (120+ lbs) would you buy bait for a panfish (~2.5 lbs)?
Credit: Tripadvisor
Of course not!
Yet, so many marketers and business owners do just this.
If you have sales happening both online and over the phone, it’s very likely your best sales and customers are coming from the phone.
Yet, you’re not even tracking those sales.
So, when you look at your PPC, you are optimizing for all of your low value sales, but completely avoiding the real profit drivers.
Uggh, that’s sucky, right?
This is something my team and I have been diligently battling.
We recently wrote a script we just had to share.
When you have phone calls that turn into sales, you want to have your marketing and platforms knowing everything, as if the sale happened online. Wee want to know the revenue, which SKU it was and so much more.
Step 1: Using a Call Tracking Solutions
The first step to solving this problem is tracking your phone calls from each click/visitor. There are a number of solutions out there. Some of them we’ve used over the years Dialogtech, Callrail, Call Tracking Metrics, Whatconverts.
Many more we haven’t used.
Why We like Call Tracking Metrics
Our favorite we keep coming back to is Call Tracking Metrics.
To our knowledge, they are the only ones that can algorithmically attribute calls from call extensions/click to calls to the click that drove it.
Here’s the thing, those pesky little ads can drive some super high volume in many verticals. In local services spaces, we see as much as 60% of the volume driven by calls from the Google side that can’t be tracked.
Plus, the Call Tracking Metrics API is super duper awesome. We’ll get back to that in a moment.
The challenge is that you still don’t have revenue.
So optimizing to phone calls instead of profit is slightly better, but definitely not the holy grail.
Step 2: Use this script to post to Google Analytics, Google Ads, Bing and more
We posted our script on Github, which allows you to export your daily phone calls, match them up to your Call Tracking metrics account, and send the revenue that was driven by those phone numbers to Call Tracking Metrics.
From there, you can send to any of the common ad platforms.
Cool, eh?
It gets better.
One of the areas that Call Tracking Metrics doesn’t do so well, is it doesn’t easily store all of the SKU information.
Say a customer bought 1 t-shirt, 2 pairs of pants and 15 pairs of underwear.
Don’t ask me why, I’m not judging.
I want to see which SKU’s were ordered in Google Analytics, so my SKU level data is correct.
So, this super duper script posts all of this data to Google Analytics as well. (Yay!).
One more plus, is that you get ALL of the sales that came over the phone.
This is helpful, as you get perspective on overall phone sales, not just those driven by ads.
That’s pretty much it.
Here’s the script:
https://github.com/resultkitchen/Call-Tracking-Metrics-ERP-Integration
Want some consulting time on how to implement this?
Head on over to: https://www.clarity.fm/davidjaeger and schedule some time with me.