Search News: Scoring with Digits – How the Phone Can Be Your Lifeline Online
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Written By Noah Mallin | November 17, 2008 | Share This
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The greatest product placement in film history may be in Ron “Opie” Howard’s film Apollo 13, the true story of the time Tom Hanks got lost in space with Kevin Bacon and Chet from Weird Science. There they are sitting in a space capsule – the culmination of mankind’s entire technological prowess – and essentially powerless and on the brink of death. What saves the day for them? Good old, low-tech duct tape.
Similarly paid search advertising is the marvelous distillation of everything learned since the ancient Egyptians first used papyrus to advertise pyramid parties. Yet there are cases where we have to turn to a comparatively lower-tech solution to measure the result of a paid search campaign: enter Alexander Graham Bell’s humble telephone.
When we talk paid search we are almost always speaking of PPC or Pay-Per-Click which assumes the customer is clicking on the ad which will take them to a landing page that might allow them to immediately close the sales loop online.
Let’s say your business model is based on a local franchise setup however, and your goal is to drive business to those retail storefronts rather than any sort of online response. You could simply send them to a geo-targeted landing page that directs them to their destination but once they show up there how do you and the client know that it was the online ad that brought them there?
Geo-targeted 800 numbers are a great way to do this – as long as you only use the numbers for your online ad traffic and don’t mix them throughout the rest of your marketing. You can get really fancy and set up different numbers for different search engines as well as for geography to get even greater insight into your campaign metrics. In any case your landing page should drive them to call their local retailer using the number provided.
This technique is also a clear winner when it comes to companies that generate a great deal of phone response as well as online response. Many people prefer to purchase some items over the phone (such as concert tickets) rather than on the net. Setting up specific response numbers makes sure that you capture some data that might be lost otherwise, even if most people will be perfectly comfortable purchasing from your landing page.
In the past we also posted about a similar technique which is especially relevant for retailers who often find that their online promotions are driving offline sales. There are many items such as speakers that the consumer will want to experience firsthand before buying after all. A simple way to measure this is to add in special “coupon codes” to your search ad copy or landing page. You can vary them by geography and engine just as you can with 800 numbers.
Just like with Apollo 13 some old standbys can be transformed by using them in tandem with new technology to deliver life saving results.
Topics: Advertising: Online, ECommerce, SEM: Paid Search, Search: How-To, Search: Innovations, Technology |