Question 1

How do you track phone calls (leads and sales)?

Accepted Answer

At Solutions 8 we use a tool called Call Tracking Metrics that records any calls that come in from your campaign. Then, we manually score every call as either a lead or not a lead. This score gets sent into the Google Ads campaign to ensure we're working with only the highest quality conversion data.

Tracking phone calls is incredibly important for accurate reporting. Any calls that come in from your campaign are recorded using a tool called Call Tracking Metrics.

Here’s how it works:

First, a lead calls from an ad extension or from your website.

When this happens, we can see some really useful data:

What page of your website the individual was on when they called
What keyword they used to land on your website
Which campaign generated that user

Then, a member of our team manually scores every call. After listening to the call recording, we manually import the quality conversations and the associated data into Google Ads.

Most agencies use a time threshold to determine lead quality (for example, any call over 45 seconds is automatically recorded as a conversion); however, we ensure lead quality manually, which makes for far superior data.

For more info, read our guest post "How to Track Your Phone Calls in Google Ads Using CallTrackingMetrics"

Question 2

What Can I Afford To Pay For A Lead From Paid Ads?

Accepted Answer

If you’ve been using Google Ads or other paid advertising platforms to generate leads, you probably noticed that among all of them, Google tends to have the highest cost per lead (CPL).

Why?

Because the conversion rates of those leads are usually higher. Google understands the intention of its users and uses their algorithm to actively seek out users who have shown an interest in your product—those who are ready to buy.

According to Unbounce, “50% of people arriving at a retailers site from paid ads are more likely to buy than those who came from an organic link.” Click-throughs from PPC results convert 1.5 times more than organic search results (Atomic Reach). Meaning, in terms of getting higher bottom-funnel conversions, PPC beats SEO.

To make sure you have a well-optimized PPC campaign that generates revenue, it’s crucial to gather conversion data first. Sure, it might take some time. But it’s one of the most important elements in building high-performing campaigns that give you a huge return for every dollar you spend in advertising.

Question 3

How do you track leads who call my business?

Accepted Answer

Most agencies will count a call that lasts 45 seconds or longer, for example, as a conversion. But we try to minimize false leads by hiring a designated team to listens to the calls that come in from an ad and give it a score. This also gives us the added bonus of helping us to uncover any issues that might be negatively affecting conversion rates during the calls (like an automatded answering machine that is confusing people, for example, or low quality leads who are asking for something different than what your business sells, etc.).

We use a platform called Call Tracking Metrics to help us record incoming calls and determine which were true leads.

What Is Call Tracking Metrics (CTM), and Why Do You Absolutely Need It?

Record, measure and listen to the calls your advertising efforts generate in real time! All phone call data is seamlessly linked to your Google Analytics, making it easy to define your exact ROI from your ad campaigns.

Here's how it works:

We generate a tracking number that will magically appear on your website instead of your real number only when someone has recently clicked on an ad. We generate another tracking number that will appear on the mobile ads as an ad extension, and ad leads will click on this number directly from the ad on their phone and their phone will dial the number, which will, of course, redirect them to your real number.
When either of these scenarios happen, someone from your business answers the phone and engages the prospect in conversation. The call will be recorded. We have a call rater who listens to every call, determines whether the person who made the call is an actual lead who is expressing interest in your product/service, and then rates it as a lead or not.
We are also able to see some very useful information about each call:

What page of your website the individual was on when they called
What keyword they used to land on your website
Which campaign generated that user
whether users were experiencing a challenge when attempting to place an order. So, that is a great QA check.

After that, we will import any of the leads who made the call from the website into Google Ads to attribute the conversion back to the day the person interacted with the ad(s).
If the call was made from the ad extension on the mobile ad, then it will be automatically counted as a lead only if the call lasted 30 seconds or longer. Google does this automatically because there is no functionality to import them (since they made a call directly, there is no tracking ID number, which is called a GCLID).

Here's the most important piece: After we listen to the conversation to access whether or not the lead was good or not, we go into your Google AdWords account and score the lead. This gives Google a lot of great data to work with.

If the lead was of poor quality, Google will limit the amount of times the ad gets shown to the same type of person.
If the lead was great, Google will show your ads to similar people who fit that leads profile.

End result? You get more conversions for a better cost.

***Please note that we pay for your Call Tracking Membership when we manage your advertising campaigns. The only cost to you is the monthly cost per number (In the US it is usually $1.50/number) and the cost per minute, which is usually less than $0.05 per minute.

Here is a screenshot of all the information you can receive about where exactly a call was coming from.

**Testing Your Magic Number*Once you or your vendor has setup the magic number on your website, you can test it to make sure it's working. Here's how: Open an incognito window and go to: [place URL here]/?gclid=test (i.e. yourwebsite.com/?gclid=test). You should see the magic number instead of the real number.

Question 4

Is it possible to run an e-commerce campaign but built as lead generation?

Accepted Answer

It doesn’t always make sense to setup e-commerce tracking in Google Ads.

Instead, we can just assign a static conversion value for the order form submission (average order price) and use that for tracking ROAS.