Seems like mobile is all the rage lately. Millions of smartphones are being activated every day and have officially outpaced PC sales. In Google’s recent earnings report, some analysts found a scary trend. While searches and ad clicks are going up, increasing 39% in 1Q 2012 over 1Q 2011, CPCs have actually been declining for 2 consecutive quarters . Google says the factors leading to this are “complicated” but notes that among other things, the increase in mobile usage of Google and the still lower CPCs on mobile are a large contributor. In 2011, 1 in 4 searches on Google were from a mobile device, and is predicted to overtake PC’s for local search by 2015.
One amazing advantage the smart phone has that the PC doesn’t have, is an integrated feature built right into every operating system – through it you can have access to a real-time, digitally streaming, two-way communication devise, delivering instant engagement between an advertiser and target customer. No it’s not some fancy new mobile-cookie-retargeting-reverse-geo-fencing rich media chat-based ad unit, but a good old fashion phone call! Advertisers, especially small businesses, love it when their phone rings, and on the other end is a customer saying “Hi, I’m interested in this product you have to offer”. With a conversation like that it’s no wonder a phone call still converts higher than any search campaign and it’s a technology every business already supports today.
So if you think about it from that perspective phone calls should be counted as a form of lead and optimized to – just like any other online engagement or CPA event. (BTW – if you think you’re in the clear from CPA by charging CPM or CPC – think again! All smart money advertisers are constantly backing out every dime spend on advertising to an ROI – in most cases its CPA or CPL – Cost Per Lead) In the early days of display, we almost felt like showing a phone number either in the ad or on the website was cheating or a cop out. We’re here to do “online” advertising after all so if we can’t market our advertisers products effectively enough where the consumer feels they have to pick up the “offline” phone to call the business directly for assistance, we’ve failed in some way. Plus, even if you wanted to, how would you know how many phone calls your ads produced? If an advertiser said, “I want my CPA to be when my phone rings” how would you know which ones to take credit for? Here’s how:
Tracking phone calls is actually remarkably easy. I know some of you ad ops folks out there probably figured, “OK, I’ll setup some click event on the display ad to ping a tracking pixel every time someone taps the “call now” button”. OK, that’s great but what if the user calls the phone number without clicking on your ad? How do you know how long the call lasted for? Did it connect? Did the business pick up or did it go to voicemail? Was it the new customer that the advertiser was hoping would call them or an existing customer?
The solution is actually built right into the phone communications industry. You can setup what’s called a “Call Tracking Number” or CTN for short. The CTN is nothing more than a new phone number (ideally as close as possible to the advertisers original phone number) and anyone that calls the phone number is just forwarded to the advertisers original phone number. Think of it like a click redirect URL. The advertiser has one phone line, but multiple phone numbers floating out there where at least one of them (your CTN) is sharing a rich set of usage results and performance metrics back to you. Just like a phone bill, you can track everything from caller ID, call duration, call status (did it answer, go to a busy signal, or ring forever?), call type (mobile/cell, VOIP or landline). With the advertiser’s permission, you can also setup call recording so you or the advertiser can go back and asses call/lead quality. Did this call convert into a sale?
There’s also plenty of drawbacks to this approach you should be aware of as well. We all get random “wrong number” calls. Ever get a new phone number and for a couple months you keep getting calls from people asking for “Bryan”? (“What you mean this isn’t Bryan’s phone number any more? Do you know Bryan’s new phone number?” No I don’t! Otherwise I’d call Brian and give him his old phone number back! Stop calling me!). Adding CTN’s increases the risk of this happening to your advertiser, so it’s a delicate balance. There’s also a finite number of phone numbers out there (unlike click redirects) so depending on how picky the advertiser is about there phone number, it might be a challenge to find one they are willing to use.
There’s some more to this that I’ll try to expand on in future posts, but at the end of the campaign, imagine sending a report back to your advertiser saying – “As a result of our ad campaign, here’s how many people were interested enough in your product that they called your business and talked to your sales rep(s) for this average length of time”.
Just think about how compelling that is as a value statement.