Two Wheels Marketing is a boutique digital marketing agency located in Columbus, Ohio with expertise in paid digital marketing (PPC, paid social advertising) and SEO. We serve a wide range of clients in different industries including both lead generation and eCommerce as well as some standard brand-specific clients. Our clients typically come to us to help them generate more leads, sales, and brand exposure. We develop strategic digital strategies to meet their goals and budgets.
We started using CallRail years ago to assist us in better call tracking for our clients. With so many lead-generation clients, it’s imperative that we track our digital marketing efforts to show clients how many calls we are getting from our efforts, in addition to other lead-generation goals like form submissions, newsletter emails, text chats, and more.
Benefits of call tracking for agencies
The nice thing about CallRail Call Tracking is that it not only tracks phone calls, but provides us with more granular data to help us run our campaigns more effectively. Data like date and time of call, call duration, city/state, landing page they called from, caller phone number, and most importantly for us as a digital agency: paid medium (Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, organic, etc.) as well as campaign and keyword information. This information lets us be more strategic with our campaigns and the clients’ campaign spend.
For example, if we see certain mediums, campaigns, and keywords regularly bringing in quality leads, we can allocate budget more effectively and save the client money by allocating more budget to the right strategies.
CallRail also has a lead scoring tool which can help with the quality of leads, since we know that it’s not just the volume of leads (calls), but the quality of those leads as well. So if we get 50% of our quality leads from Google Ads through campaign X and keywords Y and Z, we know where our budgets should be.
Alternatively, if we are getting lower quality leads or short call durations where people hang up, we can identify any keywords or campaigns that need to be paused, again to help save money and allocate to the mediums, campaigns and keywords driving quality leads.
Tracking estimated sales from phone calls
Any digital marketers out there know that tracking sales from a phone call is a really hard thing to do. This is because, as far as we know, there is no automated solution for this; no one knows exactly what happens on sales calls and it would take the phone call sales rep to mark down the final sales derived from a given call. This can be done and is done in some cases when larger companies have the staff and training to ensure salespeople are recording this sales data, but for small and medium-sized businesses, this can be a real challenge.
How eCommerce companies can track revenue from phone calls
As a digital marketer driving traffic to an eCommerce site where there are a large number of phone calls in addition to online orders, you’re missing out on revenue that YOU are helping to generate, but is not getting reported to the end client. An example would be a music instrument company like Sweetwater *not a client, where people are looking for an instrument and really just don’t have a clue what they need and need to talk to a sales rep.
If you’re a digital agency running ads for Sweetwater, you’ll get a lot of clicks on your ads that lead to people calling and talking to a “Sales Engineer” and not buying something right away. They may just need help and then decide later to buy or buy online through the rep, but by then you have already lost them in tracking online sales from your digital campaigns.
Develop an equation for phone call sales
However, by using a CallRail and tracking phone calls from your campaigns, you will have the data and intelligence to make an informed estimate on sales or potential sales from the calls you are delivering. Because CallRail tracks call duration and records phone calls, you can utilize that information to develop an equation to estimate phone call sales. Analyzing that data over time gives you a more accurate idea of average order values based on phone calls.
For example, you monitor your calls for 1 month and get 1,000 calls that are 5 minutes in length or longer (Your sales team tells you that they generally need to speak with someone for 5 minutes or longer if that person is going to be someone more inclined to buy). You know internally that salespeople close about 25% of their calls to sales and that an average order value for Sweetwater is $250.
You can develop this equation: (1,000 calls 5 minutes or longer x 25% close rate to sales x $250 average order value) = $62,500 in “estimated” phone call sales.
Now, if you’re running Google Ads PPC campaigns for Sweetwater and your report for last month generated $250,000 in online revenue only, you have NOT included any estimated phone call sales. But now, utilizing CallRail tracking and a simple equation (that can easily be adjusted as you learn more and tweak it), you can add this revenue to your monthly report to show the client that you not only helped generate online sales, but there were several “sales” related calls that generated revenue, and here’s our estimate of what that was. Effectively, you are helping to show the additional value you are bringing this client from your digital efforts which were not there before. You’re welcome!
CallRail for florists: Estimating sales from phone calls
Now, we work in many different niches, but one niche we have found very helpful for is florists who sell most of their bouquets online and receive several phone call orders. And let me tell you, florists don’t have a ton of time to record if a phone call delivered an actual sale or not. We worked with several florists to develop an equation that helps us estimate phone call sales for them. In some months, we’ve found as much as 50% of the “conversions” (online transactions or phone calls) coming from phone calls and phone call orders.
Because CallRail syncs so well with Looker Studio, we can automate this calculation and even provide it to clients on a report so they have real-time access to the estimated phone calls sales our team delivers.
For this particular client, our equation is: Total calls over 4 minutes x 80% close rate x $100 average order value.
You can see that CallRail already provides this information automatically (we filter by calls 4 min or longer) and then just add simple calculations to come up with our estimated total revenue by medium, in this case, Google Ads and Bing Ads. Our campaigns estimated phone call sales for this florist in that month were an additional almost $18k! So not only are we tracking all the online orders through typical eCommerce tracking, but we are helping to estimate phone call sales which shows the additional value that these calls and our efforts are bringing as a digital agency.
Conclusion
For those agencies that manage eCommerce clients, and especially eCommerce clients that receive phone call orders, CallRail integrated with your LookerStudio reports can help provide agencies and the end client with a more accurate look at the revenue their agency is delivering them. For agencies, this helps prove the real value their digital marketing services are providing and can help extend the life of their relationships with their clients.
