How to Use Call Tracking to Optimize PPC and SEO

Have you ever heard of the call tracking feature dynamic number insertion? If you haven’t, it’s not a big deal, because not many online marketing agencies have and use it combined with A/B testing to push their clients’ conversion rate up. But what is this dynamic number insertion feature of call tracking software?

Dynamic number insertion is a feature that dynamically displays a unique phone number that is dependent on a specific ad, or ad group, or even referring websites that someone visits your website from. This call tracking feature was one of the important topics discussed in a A/B testing software” href=”https://www.convert.com/academy/5-ways-digital-marketers-use-call-tracking-to-grow-their-business” target=”_blank”>recent webinar by McKay Allen, the Inbound Marketing Manager at LogMyCalls where we discussed call tracking.

When someone clicks on your site following an organic search like Google’s, they see a certain phone number (assuming you have one). Also, assuming you have retargeting ads that the visitor goes through, they will notice a different phone number. When a call is finally made by the site visitor, you are able to know if that call is organic search-generated or if that call is as a result of a retargeting campaign. That is an example of dynamic number insertion. You can have as many numbers as you want. You can choose to have all of your Google PPC campaigns to have the same phone number as the PPC campaign itself. Or choose to have variations of every single ad in a different ad copy that has a different phone number that’s generated when you come to the landing page. As such, you can choose to be specific or get more general by perhaps having all your organic traffic see one number and all your paid traffic seeing another number. Only you can choose how specific – or non-specific – you want it to be.

How Dynamic Insertion Works

Basically, there is a specific element you have to insert within the URL you’re driving people from to the landing page URL that you’re using in your PPC ad campaign. You simply insert ‘lmc_track=X’ where ‘X’ signifies the tracking number you want at the end of the URL.

You also need to put JavaScript code on the header section of your site. When the code sees the specific DNI from the viewer URLs, it will then switch to the phone number from the call tracking software.

Call Tracking for Seo

There seems to be this perception that call tracking hurts SEO. It does not. If used correctly, call tracking for SEO can be very effective if you use the number in the search engine. Allen observed during the webinar that LogMyCalls has indeed written a detailed document about the subject, 35 pages to be exact. You can get access to this through a post the company published in the Search Engine journal which but takes care of most of what call tracking for SEO entails.

Basically, you can track which search engine generates calls for you. Not only that, you can also track which keywords generate calls as part of the package by LogMyCalls. You can also determine how various phrases perform against each other: you can know how many people search for a particular phrase and how many actually get around to make a call from that phrase and compare how it’s doing against its counterpart. And the importance of calling cannot be overemphasized enough. You know why? Because of the rate of conversion optimization they offer. A whopping 87% of people who search for a local business end up calling or going to that business within just 24 hours! Numerous agencies, in-house and individual marketers across North America use this as a way to improve the tracking of their clients’ SEO. And the results have been positive with many admitting it’s a great way to measure their campaign.

Call Tracking for a Marketer

You know the best part about it on your part as a marketer? It’s a great way to get credit for your efforts, if we care to be honest with ourselves here. If you are an agency and are responsible for increasing the rank of your client, you want to get credit when the call volume does increase. And if you are an in-house marketer and your organization’s SEO is improving as a result of your efforts, you don’t want to just get credit for the increased traffic to your site. You want to be getting credit for all the calls that you gain. Calls have a better conversion rate optimization, and as such, are more valuable.

Want to see the entire webinar for free, click here.