April 4th, 2016

6 Tips for Improving Call Rates for Google AdWords

PPC call rate
Getting potential customers to reach out to your company with a phone call can be a critical step in the sales process. If you’re running call-only ad campaigns or want to boost the number of call conversions you get from your existing PPC campaigns, improving you call rate for your Google AdWords campaigns can be an effective way to persuade your audience to pick up the phone and call your business. Whether you’re already following our best practices for running call-only campaigns, or if you’re just getting started with optimizing your PPC campaigns, these six tips for improving call rate will help take your AdWords campaigns to the next level. 

With the shift to mobile it is more critical than ever to optimize for calls. Users don’t like to fill out contact forms on smart phones if they can avoid it. And if you are pushing calls your overall conversion rates will increase. Take a look at some recent results for a personal injury attorney. You will see how calls are driving over 90% of their conversions. Users are presented with the option to fill out a form or call. While the cost per lead will seem high for many people outside of legal advertising these are very good numbers for personal injury advertising.

Optimize Google AdWords to promote calls

1. Think Beyond the Ad and Optimize Your Website for Calls

Improving call rate involves more than just adding a phone number to your PPC ads. Your website and landing pages should also be optimized to prompt customers to call you. Conversion rate experts assert that reducing friction to finding information drives higher conversion rates. If improving your call rate is the priority for your marketing efforts, be sure to make it as easy as possible for customers to find your phone number on your website. On our own website, we follow this practice by placing our phone number at the top of our homepage. This makes it easy for new clients to quickly make contact with the Google AdWords experts at Webrageous. 

webrageous call rate

2. Leverage Click-to-Call Ad Extensions

One of the best ways to garner more call conversions is to focus on mobile PPC. Because many mobile PPC users don’t have to switch devices to make a call, mobile is an ideal channel for improving your conversion rate. In particular, the Click-to-Call Ad Extension makes it dead-simple for smartphone users to call your company with a single click. According to Google, adding a call extension to your mobile ads can increase conversions by 6-8% on average. If you’re running mobile PPC ads but aren’t using this valuable extension, you are likely missing out on potential customers.              

3. Match Your CTA to Your Call’s Goal

Your language should echo the action you want your audience to take. Using phrases like “call now” or “speak to an expert” in your ad copy gives a clear message about the action you want your viewers to take. In addition to using language that will trigger the right action, your CTA should express the value of the call to the caller. Call conversions can represent a larger commitment on the lead’s part than other conversion types. They require the individual to commit to speaking with your company directly and immediately, rather than at their own pace. Make sure that your CTAs give some context as to what a prospective customer can expect from the call. Are you offering more general information about your business offerings? Or should prospects call only when they’re ready to make a purchase, or to ask for pricing information? Craft your CTA to make sure that your audience will know what they’re in for when they decide to call. That clarity will help convince them that making the call will be worth their time.

4. Know Your Audience’s Schedule

Digging into your audience’s behaviors is an effective method for improving call rate. Be sure to consider the best time to call from the perspective of your customers. To get a sense of your customers’ preferred times for calling, dive into your CTR and conversion data in Google AdWords. You can also use that information to A/B test what times and days your audience is most responsive.

To ensure that your audience truly converts, you need to have someone available to pick up the phone when a potential customer calls. For example, if you see an influx of calls during your office lunch hour because people are calling in on their lunch hour, consider putting someone on phone-answering duty to intercept any potential customers who call during that time.

5. Focus Ad Spend During Optimal Calling Hours

Boosting your PPC call rate is only one part of the campaign equation. Call conversions are inherently more time-sensitive than other forms of PPC conversion. Once you have a good sense of when your audience is most responsive, focus your bidding strategy on serving ads during the “hottest” times of the day and week for your target audience. Scheduling your call-focused campaigns to bid more (or exclusively) during times that you’ll be able to answer calls is key to running a successful campaign without wasting ad spend. You can use AdWords ad scheduling functionality, also known as dayparting, to focus your bids on the hours that you know you’ll be ready to receive calls.

6. Get a Good Look at Click-to-Call Metrics

Do you know which ads are getting you the most calls? Which ones are falling flat? Part of refining your call conversion strategy is keeping a close eye on what works and what doesn’t work. Be sure to take a data-driven approach and make sure that you’re tracking the right metrics to gauge the success of your call-based campaigns. Understanding what information is vital to the success of your campaigns can make or break PPC campaigns. This analytical approach is where PPC management firms like Webrageous can truly make an impact on your campaign. Our PPC experts have extensive experience analyzing AdWords metrics and performance.

Taking Your PPC Call Rate to the Next Level with Webrageous

If you’re aiming for a higher call conversion rate and aren’t seeing results on your own, we can help. Webrageous specializes in optimizing PPC campaigns to give our clients the best possible results for their advertising dollar. Contact us today to learn more about how Webrageous can give your call-based PPC campaigns a boost and help you see real returns from your campaigns.

Header photo credit: Flickr, Steven Lilley

February 25th, 2016

How to Track Call Conversions from Websites with AdWords

call conversions

For many businesses, PPC campaigns are designed to drive not just web traffic, but generate calls. Seventy percent of mobile browsers have called a business directly from an ad. When done correctly, taking advantage of this high-converting market segment can have a huge impact on the success of your PPC campaigns.

However, capturing information about these callers can be tricky. Many organizations advertise their business’ phone number in multiple locations. Perhaps the same number that you use for PPC ads also appears on your business cards, on your web page, or in print ads. If you were to simply put your business’ phone number into your ads, your ability to track conversions from your PPC campaigns would be somewhat limited. You wouldn’t be able to differentiate between callers who convert from your PPC ads and those who convert other sources.

Ensuring that you can track your calls as conversions is an important part of managing any campaign for which phone calls are a potential conversion action. Fortunately, Google has call conversions tracking tools at the ready to help you track the performance of your ads with call extensions and call-only campaigns. 

How Call Conversion Tracking Works

The mechanism behind call conversions tracking is fairly simple. Advertisers place a snippet of code in their ads, which inserts a Google forwarding number into the ad. This unique number ensures that whether the person viewing the ad clicks on the ad from their mobile device, or copies the number onto their phone, advertisers will be able to trace it back to a specific ad location. While setting up and using these forwarding numbers is free, you’ll be charged your normal CPC rate when someone clicks or calls the number.

This can be an especially powerful tool for advertisers running multiple campaigns. Since you can create multiple forwarding numbers with Google, you’ll be able to easily differentiate between calls coming from different sources, whether those are discrete landing pages or different campaigns. When used in conjunction with target CPA and target ROI flexible bid strategies, you can track the efficacy of various keywords in driving call conversions.

What You Need to Know Before You Start

Before you dive into call conversions tracking, there are a few things you’ll need to know about the limitations of this powerful AdWords feature. While these caveats shouldn’t discourage you from tracking call conversions, they are important to take into consideration from the start.

Call Forwarding Won’t Work Everywhere

One major caveat is that that Google does not support call forwarding numbers in all countries. For most businesses in the United States, Canada and Europe this isn’t necessarily problematic. However, if your business is located outside of North America or Europe, or if you frequently use PPC ads to drive international traffic, your ability to leverage Google forwarding numbers may be limited. Want to learn more? You can find a complete list of supported countries here.

Forwarding Numbers Expire

The unique forwarding numbers created by Google for ad campaigns will expire after 90 days. As a result, any instance where that number has been used must be changed or updated after the numbers expire (fortunately, this can be done dynamically on web pages). Google does not recommend using your call forwarding numbers outside of PPC campaign materials to ensure that they perform effectively.

No Support for No Caller ID

Additionally, Google does not currently support caller ID, so advertisers aren’t able to track or record who calls are coming from automatically. However, AdWords does record the area code of incoming calls, so advertisers won’t be left entirely in the dark as to where their calls are coming from. Another significantly missing feature is call recording, which must be supplemented by a third party provider.

Tips on Optimizing Call Conversions Tracking Performance

Format Phone Numbers Correctly

Putting your forwarding number on a landing page or website? Make sure the number is in HTML text form — rather than as part of a static image — so it can be changed dynamically. Since your forwarding numbers will expire after 90 days, it’s important to format your web pages so that the phone numbers you list can be changed dynamically. Additionally, make sure that your number is formatted exactly the same way across the page if it appears in multiple locations.

Want a deeper look at how you can optimize your page for call conversions tracking? SearchEngineLand has an excellent article on formatting pages that drive call conversions, which is a good starting point for any advertiser just getting into this space.

Test, Test, Test!

Above all else key to getting the most out of your call conversions tracking lies in ensuring that it’s actually working. Make sure that you test out your call forwarding number — both by clicking through from a mobile browser and by typing it into your phone’s keypad. Since call conversions often require tracking prospects across multiple devices or formats, testing the flow of their interaction is a critical step in ensuring that your call-only and call extension-based campaigns perform correctly.

Better AdWords Insights in Webrageous

Whether you’re tracking calls or measuring CTR, leveraging analytics information from AdWords helps advertisers run data-driven PPC campaigns. By relying on data to make decisions about how you should adjust and maintain your ad campaigns, you’ll be able to stretch your ad spend further and gain better results from your ads.

The PPC campaign managers at Webrageous have a wealth of knowledge understanding and interpreting AdWords data and applying it to successful campaigns. We can share our expertise to boost your PPC performance and help you get the most out of your digital ads. Contact Webrageous today for more information about how we can optimize your advertising campaigns and improve your conversion rate.