Bridge Your Offline and Online Marketing Efforts with AdWords

It takes money to advertise a business.

To know if your money spent on marketing is bringing the result you need, you’ll need to implement some tracking systems. In the past, measuring marketing results has been off and on. Especially when you’re relying on employees to track your offline sales. How can a business reliably track results when a potential client is coming from your website and making an “in person” phone call?

In the past, this was very challenging to measure because you never knew where a client had seen the phone number. Was it on the website, Facebook or an online or offline ad? Now Google can help track these vital customer movements so that you know what your bottom line is in marketing.

Google AdWords have been around a long time. Most everyone is familiar with the what a keyword is. Having a Google Ad that uses your keywords to send people to your website is a well know and highly utilized business practice for gaining new customers. This technique works really well for sites that do online sales, like Amazon, and can track sales conversions back to specific ad clicks.

But, there has always been an issue when a sale has to be completed via phone and not online, think Plumbers, Doctors, Lawyers and most other service providers. Usually, ads contain the businesses phone number, which is the same on every single ad. Making it difficult to know what ad or web page had prompted the new customer to call. And making foolproof tracking almost impossible.

Website Call Conversions

A new feature from Google allows advertisers to track phone calls that happen after a potential customer has clicked on an ad that goes to a website.

A tiny bit of code, that’s added to your website by your webmaster, dynamically inserts a Google forwarding phone number on the website. For example, Sam clicks on an AdWords ad for your dog grooming business, when Sam arrives at your website he sees a unique business phone number that forwards Sam’s call to your business phone number.

For Sam, he doesn’t know that difference between the tracking phone number and your business phone number. Your business still answers the phone, but this allows your business to track exactly what ad the phone call is coming from, Google logs the phone call as an action taken on your ad.

Only the people coming from the Google Ad to your website will see this phone number. Anyone else coming to your website will see your regular business phone number.

Calls to the unique Google Ad number are called “conversions” and tracked. The Google Ad phone number can display for up to 90 days and can match your website design, so the look and feel are seamless.

A business can even drill down deeper on the tracking. You can set up values for calls from different pages on your website. This way you’ll know what pages prompted your visitor to call and which keywords on the page produced the most phone calls.

This is a huge win for businesses that need to track the source of incoming phone calls. It’s kinda like a grocery store loyalty card; it’s used to track what you bought and when you bought it. Now Website Call Conversions will accurately track incoming calls from new customers, just like a grocery store card.

The Website call conversion option is available to any business using Google AdWords to advertise their business online.

Online marketing is always changing, and most of the time it is for the better! This recent modification by Google is a win for businesses that are not purely ecommerce but rely on call-in sales.