Facebook Call Tracking & Attribution
When it comes to retail, one of the most important types of digital marketing data is also one of the most frequently ignored: phone calls.
Consumers today live their lives on their smartphones, and marketers are allocating more of their digital advertising budgets to target them.
In today’s mobile-first world, digital marketing drives phone calls, and those calls drive revenue. This idea, which may have seemed crazy to marketers as recently as two years ago, is not in dispute today. And it’s because of smartphones and click-to-call.
We spoke with Blair Symes, Director of Content at DialogTech, a leading call attribution platform that helps companies increase revenue by driving more call conversions.
According to eMarketer, 62.6 percent of digital ad spending in the U.S. this year will target smartphones and mobile devices.
“Thanks to click-to-call, these ads will drive over 108 billion phone calls to businesses, and those calls will influence over $1 trillion in consumer spending,” Symes said.
“It’s why phone call attribution – knowing how digital marketing programs generate calls, sales pipeline, and revenue – is now critical to optimizing digital marketing performance and spend.”
Q. How does DialogTech monitor Facebook call conversions?
A. For every call conversion, marketers should know the marketing channel it came from (i.e., search, social, display), what search keywords the person used (if they came from search), the ad they clicked on, and the callers path through your website before and after calling.
Marketers should also capture data on the call and the caller (such as who they are, their geographic location, the time/day of the call, how long the call lasted, and did it convert to a sale) as well as what was said on the conversation.
This data is also extremely useful in optimizing campaigns.
DialogTech’s platform provides complete data on everycall, caller, and conversation from every marketing source to every agent, location, or franchisee, so marketers can measure the full CPL and ROI of every marketing activity and optimize programs to drive the most sales.
Q. How do retailers benefit from DialogTech?
A. According to BIA/Kelsey, 25% of retail purchases involve a phone call. And for high-end retailers in automotive, furniture, or luxury goods, that percentage is even higher.
Using Facebook call tracking, retailers can see exactly what marketing activities drive customer calls.
They can attribute phone calls back to specific channels, keyword searches, web pages, digital ads and offline campaigns and use this information to optimize marketing spend for what brings in the most qualified leads.
Q. What is the value of connecting Facebook marketing efforts to call conversions?
A. With all the apps and features our smartphones now have, marketers often overlook the fact that a smartphone is still a phone. The volume of call conversions to U.S. businesses from digital advertising is skyrocketing, which is especially true for Facebook and social media.
It’s set to grow 200% in the next three years (from 12.2 billion call conversions in 2016 to 36.4 billion in 2019).
It’s simple: mobile consumers are opting to engage with brands by calling rather than filling out a web form on their smartphone. Plus, calls tend to convert to revenue 10x more than web leads because callers usually have a higher purchase intent.
By ignoring customer calls from Facebook advertising,marketers are missing out on a lucrative conversion that could actually lower their overall CPL and CPA when analyzed alongside clicks.
You need this data to know which ads are working and to prove the full ROI of your Facebook ad spend to management.
Q. What trends in Facebook Call Conversions have you seen so far?
A. The growth in call conversions mentioned above is the biggest trend marketers must take note of for Facebook.
But what will be interesting to pay attention to is whether or not the “Call Now” button becomes more widely adopted by marketers.
“Call” buttons play a huge role in driving conversions from paid search, but Facebook marketers have been slow to adopt them, even though Facebook ads are driving billions of calls in the U.S. from consumers who click through to a landing page before calling.
I look forward to seeing if the “Call Now” button catches on in Facebook the way it has in AdWords.
Q. What are 3 best practices for driving call conversions via Facebook ads?
1) Location matters: Someone seeing your Facebook ad within a few blocks of your store, dealership, or business is most likely a higher-quality lead than someone seeing it at home. Facebook has several geo-targeting options to help you get the right message in front of the right person at the right time.
For example, you can show ads to consumers who are traveling or vacationing in a specific area with messaging or offers relevant to their situation. Be sure that the content in the ad and on the landing page is hyper-localized, showing information—including address and local phone number—for that specific location.
2) Calls matter: When consumers engage with digital advertising on their smartphones, they often convert by calling. So be sure to optimize your Facebook advertising for call conversions.
This means Including a prominent phone number or call button on every page of your website, testing landing pages with “call now” as the main call to action, and making sure you attribute call conversions from your Facebook ads to accurately measure cost per lead and prove (and improve) return on investment.
3) Offer the right incentives: Facebook advertising is different than search advertising. People seeing your ads in their Facebook News Feeds aren’t actually searching for your products or services. It’s important to give them a reason to stop what they’re doing and click on your ad. You should test different promotions, from percentage discounts to value-added incentives, to see what works best for different demographics.
Right now we have several big and exciting projects in the pipeline for Q4 of 2016. One of the biggest updates we just rolled out is a new product called Dialog Analytics.
It’s the only marketing solution that uses machine learning to automatically analyze the content of calls and categorize them into groups based on what marketers want to learn.
It helps marketers identify caller intent, trends, and outcomes of calls from every marketing source and understand what types of calls they are driving without having to listen to recorded calls.
To learn more about Facebook Call Tracking & Conversions, email [email protected]