B2B marketers love using paid search dollars to get landing page form submissions. It’s all about getting those names! But how well is that really working?

Web leads come with bad information (you’ve all seen abcd and noneofyourbusiness in the first name field) and low contact rates (did you know over 30% of all leads are never even contacted according to InsideSales?). These flaws alone make focusing all your efforts on web form leads an incomplete strategy. Especially for B2B marketers who are ultimately trying to get prospects on the phone. 

Why Do You Ignore Calls?

If the goal is to get your sales team on the phone with your prospects, then why don’t you take a more active interest in generating calls? If you’re like a lot of B2B marketers, you ignore calls because they are totally foreign to your native digital language, or maybe because you don’t have any call attribution, so you just assume your call traffic is negligible.  These reasons probably sound pretty familiar:

• You don’t know how to track calls, and if you can’t track it, you don’t want it
• You don’t want to waste your sales team’s time with bad calls
• You don’t think prospects want to call

The truth is, paid search is currently driving billions of calls. Not only are calls pouring in, but 57% of marketers say their sales team prefers inbound calls to web leads. And the best news is that call intelligence makes driving and tracking calls just as easy as driving and tracking digital leads. 

How Call Intelligence Works

Digital tracking and call intelligence are actually very similar. Instead of using tracking parameters in your URLs, call intelligence uses tracking phone numbers. You can capture your caller’s digital journey including their search keyword, ad, and landing page. And just like you use marketing automation to filter leads and control the lead flow, you use call intelligence to set custom routing and filtering rules. 

Unique tracking phone number’s capture each web visitor’s digital history, so when they pick up the phone, you don’t lose this trail. Then your call intelligence syncs with your bid management and analytics solutions to bring call insights into your paid search dashboard. 

Call Intelligence and Paid Search

Paid search is part of complex path to purchase. By now everyone knows they need to capture all touchpoints, or as many as possible, in the customer’s journey. But even though multichannel tracking and attribution are touted as must-haves for any B2B marketing team, a lot of marketers aren’t taking this approach when it comes to paid search. Very few marketers are using call extensions in their PPC ads, and even fewer are tracking phone calls made from their landing pages.

Call intelligence helps you bridge the gap. In this day of rising costs and strict marketing accountability, don’t be caught ignoring one of your most valuable types of leads. Just remember phone calls mean quality leads and 100% contact rates. Your sales team will love you. 

For more data and insights on call intelligence and paid search, check out the infographic below. 

This infographic was developed by Invoca.

About the Author

Amber Tiffany is the Content Marketing Manager at Invoca. Amber brings her experience across several marketing roles, including SEM, lead generation and social media, to create content that is original, educational, and above all, human.

Invoca brings call intelligence to the marketing technology stack so marketers can drive more of the calls that turn into sales.