Need for Call Tracking

4 Reasons Marketing Agencies Need Call Tracking :

Mediahawk’s marketing agencies guide to call tracking says marketing attribution as the most important aspect that helps agencies to retain more clients. Here are four reasons why call tracking is an absolute must for marketing and digital agencies.

1. Enhanced Lead Attribution

Would you start an online marketing campaign without tracking as much of the user’s journey and interaction as you can? If you can’t prove your efforts are working, then your client has no reason to invest their money and time in you.

Collecting click and conversion data on your digital campaigns is probably second nature. But of all the possible interactions, a telephone call is the closest interaction to the point of sale. If you could attribute a telephone enquiry to your agency’s marketing activity, you would, wouldn’t you? Well, you can!

Call tracking is designed with agencies in mind, to make it easy for you to say‘look what we did’. Call tracking software that records interactions at the visitor level will draw together a complete overview of the user journey. Within your reports you’ll see which marketing source drove the call whether this was online or offline materials. And if the marketing was an online source, you’ll see which pages they viewed right up until they called you.

2. Reduce Wasteful Spending

Analyze your inbound calls to identify which your of marketing efforts are not generating a return. You can use that spend for more effective marketing.

The granularity of call data allows you to dig down easily to the landing pages that are driving the most calls, and the keywords that are driving customers to those pages. This is how call tracking enables you to focus spending on channels that are proving their ROI, so you don’t have to make any assumptions.

Cost-per-response is one of the key metrics to use. It tells you immediately whether you’re getting the return you need, or whether you should revisit or cut marketing that isn’t delivering.

3. Access Real-Time Campaign Data

Call tracking generates a vast quantity of data. But for your sake, or for the sake of your client, you need to be able to find the most useful information fast. Despite the mass of data that’s accessible, call tracking software is designed to make it easy to access useful information efficiently.

Your clients will likely want to have access to the software themselves, and a good call tracking company will facilitate this by letting clients log in to a dashboard with their own branding and custom reports.

Quantitative data gets you so far, but call tracking also lets you record calls and play them back for qualitative feedback. If the calls being received are not generating revenue, call playback allows you to listen in on the calls and determine where sales are being lost. This allows managers to address any hurdles in the sales message quickly.

4. Integrate With Analytics and CRM Platforms

Call tracking software can be fully integrated with your current digital analytics, monitoring and CRM software. The ability to analyze phone calls and web enquiries together gives you a more complete picture of your marketing, from the first interaction to converting the sale.

Google AdWords Editor Version 11

AdWords Editor is a faster way for power users to manage their AdWords account and the new version aims to improve efficiency with the tool and their users.

Here are the list of changes:

Redesigned interface
Type list
Pop-out windows
More powerful accounts manager
Faster account navigation, download, and upload speeds
Make multiple changes tool

AdWords Editor has an updated interface for easier account navigation and management, including: a visual refresh, updated layout, re-organized options and settings, streamlined data view and toolbar, more prominent search, and revamped tools. The redesign allows you to both quickly perform common tasks and access advanced features and settings.

The type list (which includes Keywords, Ads, Ad groups, Campaigns, etc.) is now located in the sidebar, under the tree view. Click any item type to update the data view. You can also see the number of items (for example, the number of keywords) for your selected campaign or ad group.

Open pop-out windows by selecting your account or any number of campaigns and/or ad groups, then double-clicking a type in the type list or clicking the pop-out arrow icon. Pop-out windows allow you to view different parts of your account, campaigns, or ad groups at the same time.

The accounts manager now allows you to add and manage an entire MCC account, as well as download data for multiple accounts at the same time. You can also view the total number of changes, errors, and warnings in an account from the accounts manager.

Experience improved account download and upload speeds, as well as faster navigation and a streamlined experience within AdWords Editor.

The Make multiple changes tool automatically organizes your text into rows and columns to allow you to add, update, or remove multiple items at once.

Reasons Why Amazon and Facebook Are Gaining on Google

Google is now the most used search engine on the web and owns at least 67 percent of search traffic. Here’s why Amazon and Facebook are about to make things more interesting.

Consumers can buy just about anything on Amazon, which means that Amazon controls more wallets than Google. Amazon is working on its own PPC software and intends to place ads on-site, reportedly by the end of 2014.

Amazon Knows No Boundaries

Amazon is a direct competitor to Google Play. Amazon is very active in the digital services area—consumers can buy digital music and videos on Amazon. Plus, Amazon has created devices that make it easy to interact with its services.Amazon and Google both have a stake in Cloud Computing. In this case, it’s less about ad dollars and more about being the dominant player overall and controlling the operating system of the web.
Facebook Knows People
The more than one billion people who use Facebook freely surrender ridiculous amounts of personal information for the privilege of using the “free” social media service. Google AdWords knows peoples’ search phrases. Facebook knows peoples’ likes, interests, employment history, political views, who they’re related to, who their friends are and much, much more (probably more than Facebook users really want to think about). Facebook can use that personal information to target ads with more precision than Google can. With its new ad service called Atlas, Facebook will use what it knows about people to take ads offsite. Because it doesn’t rely on cookies to track consumers, Atlas is able to follow users as they jump from iPhone to laptop to tablet to any device, allowing Facebook to track end to end performance of the ads. Atlas claims it can “connect online campaigns to actual offline sales, ultimately proving the real impact that digital campaigns have in driving incremental reach and new sales.” Google will catch up, eventually.Both Facebook and Amazon are coming at Google’s lock on advertising from new angles–that’s why this could be an honest to goodness fight for online advertising dollars and beyond. Too bad for Google that it can’t send out a Penguin or Panda to fight off the competition.

Conversion Estimates Added To Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool

Google announced that they've upgraded the Keyword Planner tool to support conversion estimates.

Now you can use a slider to see how varying bids may influence your campaigns’ performance differently for desktop and mobile devices. Specifically you can enter in your conversion rates and values and Google will show you in this tool the estimated conversions, ROAS, average CPA, and total conversion value for both desktop and mobile campaigns.

Here is a picture of it in action:

Let’s say you’re an online retailer gearing up for the busy shopping season with a cost-per-acquisition target of $25. In the example image below, you can see how varying your bids may influence your average cost-per-acquisition based on the conversion rates and values that you’ve entered.

Now let's say you realize that people who search on mobile devices are twice as valuable to you as people searching on desktops. You’ll be able to see how changing the mobile bid adjustment will help you get the best ROI from your campaign.

Advertisers/developers are already excited about this added feature and want it built into the APIs.

Google Analytics Adds A New AdWords Report For Aggregate Account Reporting

Google announced that there is a new Google Analytics report for AdWords customers who manage multiple AdWords accounts for the same site.Google explained that many advertisers have multiple AdWords accounts linked to a single Google Analytics property. So they are enabling you to see your data gathering and reporting in a single interface. Google is launching a new "Accounts" report in the AdWords section of Google Analytics.

The account report allows advertisers to see their aggregated Acquisition, Behavior and Conversion metrics for each account on a single row. From there you can drill into a specific campaign. This report shows you both AdWords metrics, i.e. Impressions, Clicks, CPC and Google Analytics metrics, i.e. bounce rate, time-on-site, % new users.

Use the AdWords Accounts report to evaluate the overall performance of each of your linked AdWords accounts. See aggregated metrics for each account in a single row.Once you've identified accounts that are underperforming according to your advertising goals, consider optimizing those accounts. You may also want to consider allocating more resources to high performing accounts.

Google algorithm update

Google launched Penguin 3.0 in a pretty sloppy way, they also launched the DMCA algorithm and had Panda refreshes throughout that time.Google also updated their technical webmaster guidelines with extreme hints at mobile UX ranking signals. They added a feature to Webmaster Tools for mobile usability issues and did a ton of mobile interface warning tests.



Google also confirmed toolbar PageRank is dead again and released a new In The News news box that upset a lot of publishers. Finally, it looks like Matt Cutts is not returning in 2014 to Google. The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread is still pretty active talking about all the updates, as many are still rolling out.

Google Recommends Using Both XML Sitemaps And RSS/Atom Feeds For Optimal Crawling

Google published a set of best practices for XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds on its Webmaster Central Blog this week, explaining which fields in sitemaps are important, when to use XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds, and how to optimize them for Google.
Google explains the differences between the formats by saying that XML sitemaps describe a whole set of URLs within a site, while RSS/Atom feeds only describe the most recent changes. As a result of XML sitemaps containing more information, they are typically larger than RSS/Atom feeds. XML sitemaps are also downloaded less frequently.
As a website owner, which format should you use if you want your website to be crawled to the best of Google’s ability. Google recommends using both, explaining how the formats compliment each other.
XML sitemaps give Google information about all the pages on your site, while RSS/Atom feeds let Google know what has been most recently updated on your site. Google also adds that “submitting sitemaps or feeds does not guarantee the indexing of those URLs.”



Here is a condensed version of best practices Google laid out in their blog article:

• The two most important pieces of information for Google are the URL itself and its last modification time.
• Only include URLs that can be fetched by Googlebot (ie, don’t include URLs blocked by robots.txt).
• Only include canonical URLs.
• Specify a last modification time for each URL in an XML sitemap and RSS/Atom feed
• For a single XML sitemap, update it at least once a day and ping Google each time.
• For a set of XML sitemaps, maximize the number of URLs in each XML sitemap. The limit is 50,000 URLs or a maximum size of 10MB uncompressed. Ping Google when each XML sitemap is updated.
• When a new page is added or an existing page meaningfully changed, add the URL and the modification time to the RSS/Atom feed.
• In order for Google to not miss updates, the RSS/Atom feed should have all updates in it since at least the last time Google downloaded it.