4 Musts for Making Mobile Click-to-Call Work

The growth of mobile search has reignited interested in lead generation, but local businesses sometimes have trouble connecting mobile data to customer purchases. In a Street Fight webinar Thursday sponsored by Telmetrics, Jay Weintraub, CEO and founder of grow.co, and CJ Arseneau, vice president of marketing for Telmetrics, addressed how companies are moving closer to tracking customer purchase behavior from an online impression to offline action.

“We all know that the customer who calls us or that we get on the phone is an incredible lead, in comparison to a customer who has not taken that action,” Weintraub said. Customers now have the ability to press “dial” right after performing a search, which is generating more leads, but also adding a new layer to the digital field.

But calls are not clicks, said Arseneau. And when it comes to mobile attribution, they should be measured as calls.

“Calls are an essential piece of the offline attribution puzzle,” Arseneau said. “Clicks don’t confirm that calls were completed or add to anything besides the click count.”

Measuring calls can validate consumer behavior and engagement, and marketers can use “after the click” information to better determine consumer intent, increase lead generation and drive up calls.

With the right technology and applications, even small companies can leverage mobile data to understand customers better. Better understanding will increase quality lead generation both online and offline, and complement each other for a more holistic view of customer needs. Arseneau spoke of four best practices that can support company goals for call attribution.

Measure calls as calls – not clicks: Gaining insights from actionable calls will provide better data and greater value for each lead. Arseneau spoke of one company, a hotel chain that was previously measuring calls by counting clicks on call buttons. That data was unreliable. The company couldn’t tell if the call connected or what was driving the quality phone leads that did occur. By tracking call information and caller demographics, companies will gain tangible performance results and conversion data that can be used to drive more consumer action.

Use local numbers: Consumers are more likely to engage with mobile ads when the content is locally relevant, Arseneau said. And mobile users prefer local phone numbers – not toll-free ones.

Ensure quality calls: Thirty-seven percent of calls to advertisers are spam, Arseneau said. Ensuring that company programs are successfully blocking spam can have a big effect on conversion rates and advertiser satisfaction. “Nuisance calls” will also increase the margin for error in analyzing the response data.

Use dynamic call tracking: Dynamic call tracking replaces static phone numbers on webpages with call tracking numbers, which allow tracking of calls back to the referring digital sources. Even when a consumer is using multiple devices, the dynamic tracking numbers can attribute each lead to a specific consumer action, and provide stronger proof of performance.

To watch the full webinar, click here. For more about mobile attribution strategies, click here to read other posts in Telmetrics’ “After the Click” series.