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Finding Clicks In Call Search Marketing

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Small-and-medium size local businesses sometimes get the short end of the stick. Advertising and search engine marketing (SEM) budgets typically remain too lean to get hand-holding marketing support. Still, many rely heavily on the Web to reconnect with existing clients and find new ones. Kenshoo Local, a Kenshoo business unit focused on SMBs, inked a deal with Mongoose Metrics providing data on how clicks lead to phone calls for local businesses.

The service for SMBs may seem incremental, but expect online services like this one to become increasingly important as more consumers research companies online. The deal announced Wednesday lets local businesses like doctors, dentists, lawyers and plumbers track clicks to calls, linking online marketing campaigns to offline sales. Also available to enterprise clients, the service expands on Kenshoo's push to provide an open platform to integrate tools from CRM vendors, Web analytics and multiple call tracking companies.

Mongoose Metrics offers a service built on dynamic number replacement technology based on individual consumers. The API integration of Mongoose Metrics' call tracking and speech recognition technology with Kenshoo Local's bid optimization algorithms, Call Conversion Optimization, allows advertisers to tap Dynamic Number Replacement to display a unique tracking telephone number for each person.

When someone clicks on an online ad supported by Kenshoo, the search marketing company attaches a unique identifier to the click. It lets Kenshoo serve up a call-tracking number to the person. The number, attributed to that browser session for 24 hours, links to a unique keyword identifier assigned by Kenshoo to the landing page URL.

The unique identifier tells Mongoose to serve up a different telephone number for that user and log that information. The data gets transmitted from Mongoose to Kenshoo nightly through an API. The size of the campaign and amount of traffic running through the system to the Web site determines the quantity of phone numbers each Web site receives.

The combined platform, which tool two months to develop and test, lets Kenshoo identify the search query, keywords, ad, and channel where the ad originated to help clients further optimize campaigns. It identifies what keywords generated phone calls, as well as the ones that didn't. Todd Herrold, director of product marketing at Kenshoo Local, says the system also identifies the path to conversion if it took multiple clicks.

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