As a small business owner you have to wear many hats, which leave limited resources available for marketing. Many small business owners think that tracking their calls will take too much time. This post will walk you through how much time you will need to allocate towards tracking your calls, and how to use the information to make your advertising profitable.
The reality is that if you are using Ad Committee correctly you should only have to dedicate about an hour a month to significantly improve your advertising ROI. In the business world the phrase, “the data does not lie” is often used, because it is true. Pick a day towards the end of the month to sit down and look at the data. You will know instantly which advertisements produce the most calls, where geographically you receive the most calls, what day you receive the most calls, all the way down to what time of day you receive the most calls. In addition to call volume and caller location, you can listen to the calls to make sure they are resulting in sales.
Getting started:
Once you're logged in to your account, click on the "view reports" tab, select all numbers from the drop down box and narrow down your search by clicking last 30 days below the drop down box. This allows you to see an overview of all your advertising campaigns. You now have a lot of information to dissect and interpret. First you can instantly see which advertisements are resulting in the most calls to your business and which ones result in the least. Let’s find out why.
1. Eliminate poorly performing campaigns:
Let’s start with the campaigns that did not result in a lot of calls to your business. It is important to point out that just because a particular campaign does not result in many calls to your business, it does not mean it is necessarily a poor performer. Generally, however the more calls the better. Click on the “listen to calls” tab. In the drop down box select the poorly performing campaign and the time period you would like to retrieve calls from. Now listen to a few of these calls. The purpose is to find out if there is something wrong with the marketing message with that particular campaign. Let’s say that after listening to several of the recorded calls you do not find anything wrong with the particular campaigns message or how the calls were handled. You now know that for whatever reasons the advertisement you paid money for did not bring you a good ROI. This could be because the message did not reach your target market or a million other reasons. The good news is you no longer are going to lose money on that advertisment; it is time to eliminate it from your advertising mix, since it has no value to your business.
In the place of the eliminated campaigns, pick another place that you have always wanted to advertise and reuse the same tracking number (make sure to rename the campaign). In the next month or two, depending on how long it takes for the new advertisement to be published, check and see if the new advertisement is bringing you more business. If it did, you have eliminated spending money on a poorly performing advertisement and transferred it to an advertisement that is resulting in new business. You are on your way to making your advertising, and yourself more profitable.
Check back next week for part two of this post. If you have any questions that are not being answered please leave a comment and we will reply.
