Call tracking can help remove the blind spot in your PPC reporting, so you get the complete picture.

In certain industries, it’s relatively straightforward working out whether PPC is worth the investment or not. Sometimes, the ultimate ROI is clear, measurable and unmistakable. Take FMCG eCommerce sites. When it’s one smooth journey from PPC ad to purchase, seeing where each customer has come from and how much each ad is bringing in is straightforward enough. But it isn’t always that easy.

If you offer products that may require a bit of thought before purchase, your data could be missing key insights. It will often be the case that a customer sees your PPC ad and then spends a few days or even weeks considering their options before they finally buy. If you’re in the business of selling something like energy or even cars, your customers will likely do some comparing and contrasting before making that final commitment. So, if they search for, say, “low-cost electricity”, they might see your ad – but rather than buying there and then, they will just add it to a list of brands to consider. Then, later, they may return to your site to buy. Yet there will be no way of knowing that this sale originated with a PPC ad. Being aware of this issue is one of the first steps to an effective marketing strategy. PPC has a reputation for being pricey, but this is partly due to the fact that repeat visits and even purchases from customers who first became aware of your business via PPC are often missed in analytics. Many brands first enter customers’ awareness via PPC, but the difficulty in measuring the impact of this leads to an emphasis on other strategies.

Removing the data blindspot
Clouding the issue further is the fact that some keywords are attributed a higher cost per conversion than they might really have. In many cases – and especially in industries such as utilities, where lead times are typically long – generic keywords might appear to have a cost per conversion so high it completely deters you from bidding. But in reality, it could be that eventual conversions that started with a PPC ad are not being registered as such. ResponseTap helps remove the blind spot in your PPC reporting, so you get the complete picture. By breaking down your analytics to every single touchpoint on each customer’s journey, you can see the origins of every sale and understand how much your phone calls are really worth. And with new feature Smart Match, ResponseTap allows you to integrate your company’s sales figures into your analytics. It’s altogether a more specific, more personalized way of measuring value. It means you can discover the value of every click and every phone call.

Revealing a new PPC picture
As developments in the technology of data science continue to ramp up, marketers are finding new and more sophisticated means of using data.

With the true stats at your fingertips, you can allocate spending to the areas that are really delivering – and you may, surprisingly, find that includes PPC. Watch how one of ResponseTap’s partner agencies, Search Laboratory, uses ResponseTap to optimize their PPC campaigns here.