Why is paid search call tracking important? Because most online traffic is mobile now, most inbound calls are mobile now…and click-to-call commerce potentially drives more than $1 trillion.
As a digital marketing professional, you have a variety of paid campaigns and countless performance metrics to track. But if your business has any kind of local, on-call or brick-and-mortar component, Google AdWords phone call tracking needs to be on your list.
The rise of mobile
Why is call tracking for paid search important? Because this is the year of mobile, of course. Or, last year was. Which means next year is definitely the year of mobile. In any case, the majority of online traffic is mobile now – not desktop. But you already knew that. You already know that mobile is a huge source of traffic and is important to your operations, pretty much irrespective of industry.
The role of search in paid search call tracking
So you know that mobile is obviously important to your business, but how does that pertain to paid search or call tracking? Here’s how: 60% of inbound calls are mobile – clocking in an estimated 85 billion calls for 2016, and projected to effectively double to 169 billion by 2020.
Repeat: for any business that receive any number of inbound calls as a lead channel of any significance, the vast majority of those calls come from mobile. In other words, that Google tracking phone number in your ad extensions (you are using call extensions in your search campaigns, aren’t you?) is a potential workhorse that be driving tons of new business, if it isn’t already.
More importantly, for mobile, search drives more business calls via click-to-call than any other online channel (more than individual landing pages, display, social or mobile messaging). For 2017, search is estimated to have generated 38% of calls – driving 39.1 billion calls, compared to 30.9B calls from landing pages, 12.4B from landing pages and 12.4B from social…and 8.2B from messaging. And on top of search being the dominant driver of click-to-call inquiries, this important channel is projected to only increase in volume by 52% in the next few years, from 39.1B calls in 2017 to 59.5B calls in 2020. Click-to-call business inquiries are estimated to influence more than $1 trillion in consumer spending – and as mentioned, a significant portion comes from calls generated by search.
These numbers underscore the importance of being able to track this important step in your customers’ journey, connecting the dots between your online search campaigns, calls and offline conversions. Which underscores the importance of paid search call tracking along with your traditional paid search metrics.
Takeaways
Paid search call tracking may not be the first thing on paid search professionals’ minds, but the volume of calls, the outsize contribution of search to driving inquiries through this channel and the potential revenue is too significant to ignore.
