Boost PPC to Phone Performance

Measuring the quality of calls requires an investment in process and tracking but can yield strong improvements in performance that we have found time and again to be well worth the effort.

There is one common problem with most phone call generation strategies have the same problem: they don’t track call quality, and so they have to bid as if all calls are the same quality. The problem with this approach is that not all phone calls are created equal; some are much more qualified and valuable than others and the trick is to know which ones.

Not tracking quality can result in a lot of wasted spend over time. Perhaps as much as half your spend can be wasted this way. It's quite possible to see the cost per client acquisition fall by half when quality is taken into account.

Challenges:

If you’re in an industry where sales occur offline, sales data is often not available for marketing optimization.
Even when sales data is tracked perfectly, with big ticket items (e.g. cars, homes, loans, contracts, or admissions) there is generally not a high enough volume of sale events to allow for statistically significant keyword bid decisions. This means it can take a long time to gather enough sales data to make decisions.

The goal is to create a system that tracks post-call conversion events and bids more for high-quality keywords that are producing better post-call results.

You want to use your valuable sales pipeline and call data to bid on the keywords that really matter. The goal is to produce goldilocks call data – data that is plentiful enough to be statistically significant, but still meaningful enough that it can be used for bidding decisions.

By identifying qualified calls as mid-funnel goals, you’re able to track not just keywords that generate calls, but also which ones generate quality calls.

Here’s a step by step method for measuring call quality and using this mid-funnel data to boost your performance.

Decide the definition of a qualified call and establish a process of creating a reporting circuit through which qualified calls are reported back to the marketing team. You can pull this data from your CRM system or from any file format you provide. A qualified lead could be an insurance verification for an addiction treatment center, a loan application for a mortgage broker, or it could be a subjective call disposition established by your staff.
Analyze the sales records to determine the precise value of each qualified call (e.g. how many qualified calls it takes, on average, to produce a sale).
Determine the revenue value of each sale and divide by the number of qualified calls it takes to generate a sale (step 2) to determine the revenue value of each qualified call.
Determine how many calls it takes to generate a qualified call for different groups of keywords.
Use this data to see which keywords will produce high quality calls and set bids accordingly.

Example:

Keyword A is average and converts from calls to quality calls at a 20% rate.

Keyword B is high quality and converts from calls to quality calls at a 40% rate.

Keyword C is low quality and converts from calls to quality calls at a 10% rate.

Assuming an average cost per click of $10 for easy math, here’s how we set our bids.

Keyword A - $10.00 - this is exactly average - no bid adjustment.

Keyword B - $20.00 - this is double the average quality, so we can double the bid.

Keyword C - $5.00 - this is half the average quality, so we halve the bid.

When done correctly, this will produce these benefits:

1. Outbid the competition for keywords that produce high-quality calls.

2. Free up your staff to focus on closing qualified calls.

3. Improve morale creating a virtuous cycle boosting call center performance.

4. You can reallocate your spend away from lower-converting keywords.

5. Increase overall ROI by lowering the cost per acquisition.

6. Most importantly, focusing on quality gives you more sales for your ad spend.

7. AI tools such as enhanced bidding start generating better quality.

Another benefit of measuring mid-funnel quality is to speed up the learning and optimization process. Tracking mid-funnel goals solves the problem of having too little sales data to successfully optimize keywords with statistical significance.

It speeds up the slow process of gathering statistically meaningful data.
By optimizing for mid-funnel goals, you improve your results much faster than with strategies that do not look at post-call outcomes.
More quickly find the highest quality keywords that drive sales.
You can accomplish optimizations in weeks or months that would take others years.

Additionally, once you start measuring the quality of your callers, you can adjust your bids for device, geographic location, demographics, keywords, and so on, based on where the top-quality calls are coming from.

Once you start measuring what actually matters, a whole world of optimization opportunities opens up to you.