Call Tracking and the Travel Industry: Boosting Conversions and Conserving Ad Budget
For many companies, regardless of the revenue of online sales, offline calls contribute a massive amount of the overall conversion ratio. The generally-agreed total of calls made offline which were generated through an online search is around 43%*. When these calls generally make up the higher revenue totals, there is an immediate problem in tallying these sales along with your online ones to determine ROI and your marketing efficiency.
This often happens in areas like the travel industry: it is to be expected that, for expensive purchases and complex or extended transactions, the customer will often opt to contact a sales advisor over the phone to close the deal. When you think that such a vast percentage of sales are conducted through this method, it has to be understood that, without the ability to analyze the ad source for these sales, there is no way to assess the performance of the overall campaign, nor determine a working ROI.
Call tracking software is the solution to this problem. Given the make-up of such an industry’s total revenue, this allows for responsive and informed control over the spending of one’s ad budget, and a deeper knowledge of the performance of newspaper, radio and television advertising. With the emergence of telephone conversion tracking, the aforementioned ‘chasm’ is removed.
The data retrieved using call analytics is conducive to business pragmatism, and serves to empower action made to the upkeep of a marketing campaign. The marketing budget of any business is often proportionally relative – with a smaller company, it is especially precious; with an established business it is no less indispensable because there is more of it. Being able to streamline and conserve even 10% would be a massive improvement of marketing efficiency, and as individual ad campaign numbers can be identified and confidently supplemented or reduced, savings of this kind are simply a matter of rational comparison and action.
Imagine, for example, that your new television advert has dented the budget, but you are confident about its ability to bring a profit. Sales increase, and so, happily, you consider to continue the ad, or even to expand on it, developing and furthering this particular campaign. In reality, the decision to pump more budget into this campaign has been made without the certainty that the television ad is responsible for the sales increase; it could even be that the ad is failing miserably in achieving justifiable ROI, and the sales peak is being generated by discrete from the TV ad.
With a call tracking solution, the doubt and the element of risk is eliminated. A system of identifiable telephone numbers matches the ad that generated the call, and so, if for some reason the television ad was in fact failing to achieve its potential, the call tracking software would illustrate the other origins that caused the sales boom which ’seemed’ to have been the result of the TV ad. Without this information to hand, the ’sure-fire’ decision to the continued subsidy of the TV campaign would have been a costly mistake.
As we have seen, the advent of phone call analytics turns a previously unnavigable area of marketing awareness and orientation. High revenue-achieving calls are made every day, and the only thing to decide in an industry where they are profuse is this: can I afford not to be using call tracking?
(*Source: A Nielsen/NetRatings and Webvisible survey: 2006, ComScore Google Study: March 2006)
