What happens after prospects click on your ads? Do they fill out a form, dial-up a call, make a purchase on your website, or download an e-book?
Brands now have the power to drive leads and customer calls through numerous channels, including Google Ads. It means that prospects are only one click away from taking targeted action, otherwise known as a conversion.
If your brand works with several conversion types, you’re no stranger to accomplishing different setups in your Google Ads account. Let’s take a closer look at call conversions and how employing a call tracking software and PPC ad solution can help you drive the attention and calls of the high-intent audience.
How PPC Drives High-Intent Customers
It’s no secret that a phone call is one of the most-used channels for customer service. More than 50% of clients across all age groups use it to reach out to businesses, which brings us to the next point — it’s critical to determine where the calls come from.
Naturally, it’s counterproductive to request this information from your sales department or maintain numerous phone numbers for all of your marketing channels. If calls are essential to your company, you can utilize conversion tracking for all of your PPC ad variations.
If you can motivate prospects to call, they’re likely to convert at a 10x rate. That’s one of the reasons why you need to understand how effective ad clicks are and how many of them trigger calls.
If you’re new to PPC ad campaigns, here’s what you need to know about this ad solution:
- PPC allows small businesses and large enterprises to bid on the chance to show an ad on Google
- PPC ads drive targeted traffic
- These ads can be used to promote your products outside of Google search
- PPC cannot produce the same results as SEO
But there’s a catch to it. If you’re using PPC as a principal source for driving calls, you need to ensure that your performance data is accurate. Utilizing third-party software will give you a bird’s eye view of your strategy by connecting your PPC efforts with other multi-channel activities.
Ultimately, it will help you use caller data for better ad targeting, increase traffic volume based on real-time call data, generate more calls and leads from landing pages, and plan future campaigns with the help of predictive analysis.
Let’s explore in more detail which data you can receive if you combine PPC ad campaigns with a call tracking solution.
- Conversion sources: With conversion sources at hand, you can identify the top-performing ad placements and campaigns.
- Specific call patterns: Identifying peak activity periods can help you get a high-quality call queue or, better yet, an IVR system in place.
- Keyword efficiency: When paired with a call tracking solution, PPC call campaigns allow identifying keywords that bring more leads and trigger more calls.
- Overall performance: Apart from conversion source tracking and call recordings, it’s critical to obtain extensive data on your ROI and CR. In other words, you can get granular reports on your web and call campaigns that feature vital campaign performance data.
Ultimately, PPC call tracking campaigns can help your brand achieve the mission and make educated decisions about future bid strategies and optimizations.
The Power of Google Ads & DDA Model
Let’s face it — call conversions are no good without tracking. That’s why Google Ads remains one of the most popular go-to options for advertisers. It can be used regardless of the type of call conversion you need to track. In other words, Google Ads got you covered whether you’re looking into imported conversions, calls triggered by ads, or calls that originated on your website.
The primary goal of conversion tracking remains unchanged — helping enterprises determine the effectiveness of call ads and ads with specific extensions geared toward triggering calls.
Ad Extensions Explained
What kind of extensions are we talking about? Well, Google Ads extensions are designed to empower advertisers by showing additional business information within their ads. While advertisers have 10 different extensions to choose from, we’ll focus on call extensions.
Call extensions, formerly known as call-only extensions, are geared toward encouraging prospects to call your company.
How do call extensions work? First of all, bear in mind that they appear only on mobile devices. When a prospective client clicks the ad, it automatically dials your company number.
Here’s a classic example of a call extension.
Source: Google
The “visit website” link featured on this screenshot was introduced in April 2020 as a part of the call extension update. It’s optional, which means that advertisers can choose whether they want to use it. So why add it?
While enterprises are no strangers to managing large call volumes, small businesses need to provide alternative contact options and offer more flexibility to clients. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses and customers were under a lot of stress, which caused a significant increase in call volumes. In some cases, the overall call volume exceeded 600% when compared to normal levels.
As for reporting, it’s pretty straightforward. All advertisers need to do is turn on call reporting … and voila! They can access all the call details.
Apart from call extensions, it’s critical for businesses to see the touchpoints that lead to conversion and map the paths that lead to attribution. It’s no secret that consumers interact with numerous ads from the same advertisers before making a targeted action. The challenge here is to determine how much credit each ad, landing page, channel, or keyword should receive for driving these targeted actions.
DDA For The Rescue
Lately, Google has been encouraging advertisers to switch to the DDA model. The ever-changing privacy landscape has a lot to do with the introduction of new measurement tools and conversion modeling. However, switching to this model will likely cause many questions like: “Is data-driven attribution going to work for call conversions?”
There’s no denying that DDA can offer numerous benefits. What advertisers need to worry about is getting detailed data on call conversions in Google Ads.
DDA, otherwise known as the future of attribution, is geared toward filling the gaps in acquired data and gaining new insights into customer behavior.
Here’s what you need to know about the DDA model:
- It allows assigning credit to every touchpoint along the customer journey
- The assigned credit depends on the role each interaction played in driving a conversion
- DDA can be applied to search, YouTube, display, and shopping ads
- This model allows analyzing all the relevant data about interactions, ad formats, devices, and time between interactions that led to conversions
- When utilized with automatic bidding, it allows to drive more conversions
Let’s look at the following conversion scenario and examine it closely:
- A prospect searches for a “new mountain bike.” clicks on the brand’s search ad, and visits the website.
- Then, a prospect clicks on a display ad placed by the same brand and once again ends up on a website.
- Then, a prospect views a YouTube ad placed by the same brand.
- Finally, a prospect uses a brand name as a search query, clicks on the brand keyword, and purchases a bike.
Here’s how the DDA attribution model might assign credit to all of the touchpoints:
Search Ad: 29%
Display Ad: 22%
YouTube Ad: 15%
Brand Keyword: 34%
For instance, first or last click models would only assign credit to the first and last touchpoints. Utilizing a U-shaped model (or any other model, for that matter) would assign credits to all four touchpoints, but these credits would lack context.
Ultimately, the DDA model empowers brands to apply smarter bidding optimizations to foster business growth.
Final Thoughts
There’s no denying that a simple call conversion tool might work for some marketing professionals. But for large enterprises and expanding local businesses, it is critical to get access to omnichannel data on all the driven calls.
If you’re a marketing expert looking to power up your PPC efforts, a call tracking solution will do the trick.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to data. Without it, it’s impossible to optimize your resource allocation and alleviate the confusion as to where the calls originated and what efforts triggered them.
