With the rise of mobile smart phones and the ability to call a business directly from a search result, you would think that more and more marketers would be using click-to-call ads or other phone targeted marketing to capture that audience.
Google recently reported that 70 percent of mobile searchers have called a business or organization directly from search results and that inbound mobile phone calls will grow from 40 billion this year to almost 70 billion in 2016. With numbers like that, tracking phone conversion rates is should be common practice.
However, that is not the case. In a poll done by Invoca of a 136 search marketers, only 36 percent said that their company employs click-to-call or call extensions in their mobile search campaigns. That would mean that 64 percent of those polled believe that phone calls aren’t an important part of their marketing strategies, right? Surprisingly, 63 percent said they thought that leads through phone calls were important, if not more important than web conversions. Doesn’t make sense, does it?
A possible explanation for the gap, could be because there is still a large percentage (54 to be exact) of marketers who don’t even track when search campaigns convert to phone calls. Two in five responders believed that a simple phone system for small business was not capable of tracking said information, showing to what extend the lack of information on technology can harm business growth. One in five responders said they didn’t know how you could compare the value of inbound-call conversions to web conversions, and only 17 percent of those polled said that web conversions were more valuable than call conversions.
Perhaps businesses should look further in to improving phone call conversions if they are looking for an unexpected boost.