Using Dimensions & Segments in Google Analytics to Propel Your Content Marketing

As online marketers, we all have great web metrics at our fingertips….or do we?

Using hard facts to support business decisions requires two things: reliable data and knowing the key performance indicators of the business in an online context.

I have been using Google Analytics for 10 years (since just months after the Urchin acquisition), and I have seen some great customizations of this massively popular web metrics tool. However, it is common for organizations to not even scratch the surface of what Google Analytics can offer.

Using mere headline engagement statistics, like bounce rate, without a web metrics strategy can lead to some bad decisions.

While I'm sure some of you Kissmetrics readers are already champions of Google Analytics, in this post, I will cover some tips that might help you create your own analytical setup in A/B testing, social media, AdWords, and content marketing, as well as some of the slightly newer Google Analytics features.

So, let's get into it.

Measure User Engagement and Transactional Revenue with A/B Testing

User engagement and transactional revenue can be measured with A/B testing.

For the free version of Google Analytics, get yourself an Optimizely account (also free – up to 50,000 monthly unique visitors) so you can build variations for A/B and multi-variate testing. You can set up a “custom dimension” integration with your Optimizely experiments within Google Analytics to view traffic sliced and diced as you please.

Once the “custom dimension” integration is set up for you, you can build custom reports within Google Analytics. Instead of navigating into Reporting, start with Customization from the top navigation.

Create a new custom report.

Then, build your report to include whatever Metric Groups you are interested in – user engagement and/or transactional data. Click on “+ add metric,” and type in your metric.

It's key that you select the right dimension for Dimension Drilldowns and Filters and apply a regex that is the experiment ID from Optimizely.

Once you have saved your custom report, you can view the buckets of session data against the A/B tests.

This is powerful data. You can have up to 20 Google Analytics integrated tests running at any one time providing you with classic user engagement statistics as well as “the sharp end” of conversion-led data.

In the test results below, we see major improvement from enhancing the design of a shopping cart “search” function to make it more prominent. Check out how the variation wins on conversion rate:

Measure the Popularity of Web Content at a Page Level

The popularity of web content can be measured in visitors and shares. For social media gurus and content strategists, it's great to measure key social actions at a page level.

With this information (tracked as events), you can review a blog section more effectively, understanding the visitor/share picture instantly to support the direction of future blogging or content creation. View the data within social plugins once you have everything set up.

Optimize AdWords for the Highest Quality Visits with Smart Goals

Google AdWords provides some great tracking options, including dynamic call tracking where a unique number is displayed down to the keyword level.

Introduced by Google in December 2015, Smart Goals is a useful new addition for online marketers who strive to put together the whole picture of online and offline conversions. Using machine learning, Google Analytics cleverly combines a number of technological and user metric factors to identify the highest quality visits and define them as Smart Goals.

For many e-commerce and digital managers, this is a much more straightforward way of understanding the true value of their website's tracked sessions. Assuming you have Analytics and AdWords linked up, goal conversions can also be imported into your AdWords account to assist your paid search optimization efforts. In fact, this linkage is a prerequisite to using Smart Goals, which indicates that the primary reason for this recent addition is to assist AdWords management.

How to Set Up Smart Goals

Once Smart Goals is set up in Google Analytics, you can access it within your Google AdWords account by going to Tools > Conversions > Google Analytics.

Simply select Smart Goals, which will then allow you to optimize your AdWords performance toward the highest quality visits.

Build Remarketing Lists with Smart Goals

You can build remarketing lists (called smart lists) with Smart Goals. This could seriously improve your remarketing conversion efforts and potentially your AdWords results overall. Smart lists are built within your AdWords Shared library > Audiences and will appear along with a “lookalike” audience, which could be useful if your website is lower than 10,000 pageviews / 500 e-commerce transactions per month (the threshold for using the smart lists).

Note: your Google Analytics account and script will need to be modified for these lists to work (here's how).

Measure Audience Engagement with Google Analytics

Google Analytics has always been an SEO's best friend, slightly less so when Google's move to https screened out the vast majority of organic keyword data. But, with sales, traffic, and even Google Search Console data, there is plenty to work with.

Focusing in on the Hummingbird (released 2013) and RankBrain (released 2015) algorithms makes for more progressive SEO these days.

These areas of machine learning are getting stronger at understanding the semantics and intent of search engine users. We don't know how far along Google is in understanding user engagement, but we know Google is moving in the direction of ranking content based on reputation, content quality, and usability. So here are some nice and simple analyses to run with 2 simple segments that I've created and am making available to you to import into your Google Analytics account.

Low Engagement Segments – Pages per User

Analyze “low page view per user engagement” SEO traffic with this Google Analytics segment.

This basic segment looks at traffic from Google (organic) where unique pageviews are equal to or less than 1. You could run this over a time frame, like 3 months, to understand which pages are being accessed the least. Then pop into Behavior > All pages pageviews, and filter by your /blog/ directory or /products/.

If your blog area URLs do not have a distinct pattern, then you could use content grouping for this type of analysis. It's important to weigh this segment next to something like “new users” because, over a longer date range, you can see what percentage of users were “low engagement.”

Here is an example where we examined a homepage:

Only 2.48% of users to this website's entrances are looking at only one pageview, but the average time on page is nearly 7 minutes. This analysis would give a thumbs-up for this homepage.

Now see which pages aren't getting the SEO love. In this example, we can see that this page has 97% of its entrances equal to or less than 1:

The website's dwell time on average is nearly 5 minutes so we know these visits are below average, suggesting there is a problem with the relevancy of organic search terms creating the visits and/or the landing page quality. This is a basis for an interesting discussion past this point.

Generate a list and see if they're indexed on Google with the “site:” command. If they are, see if Google's cache date is recent or not.

Make a call as to whether you update the web page's content, work harder in general at optimizing it, or delete off server/301 redirect to a similar page.

Bounce Rate and Low Average Session Time Segments

Look at organic search traffic that resulted in a bounce with this Google Analytics segment.

Backlinko's recent study of 1m Google search results suggests that there is a correlation between low bounce rates and higher Google rankings. Other studies suggest that average session duration plays an important part in search ranking so why not cross-analyze by this factor, too, with this segment.

In this example, we've applied the 2 segments from the main “reporting” area of Google Analytics and isolated a page that has a low engagement issue. Here, 42% of users leave straightaway and 44% dwell on the page for an average of only 4 seconds.

This analyzes Google SEO traffic that is low engagement in terms of average session duration – set at 60 seconds. Needless to say, each website will have a different average session duration, so you might want to copy a segment like this and amend what you deem as a positive figure for your website. As Google's RankBrain gets cleverer, this is the type of SEO-led web metric that is getting increasingly popular.

Looking to Move Off White Belt for Content Marketing?

Analyze your blog performance over the years. I have learned a lot in this area from Skip Besthoff, a pragmatic content marketer who has a great understanding of where the content game meets search engine optimization in a harmonious manner. There is a simple, common, but potentially crippling, pattern that the vast majority of blog traffic is driven by a tiny number of blog posts.

How many websites that have blogs actually do this type of analysis? If you've done it before, do you review on a frequent basis? The “meat” of such analysis can be formed on basic Behavior > All pages pageviews and then filtering web pages from there:

• For your filter, use the directory that all blogs appear within (e.g., /blog/, /news/, or /articles/).


• If the blog posts aren't in one easily identifiable directory, this may be a bit of a blocker. In this case, you'll want to use content grouping.

Here is an example where we filtered for any URL with “guide” in it:

…which then shows us a common picture arising out of many blogs:

Here 94% of the blog pageviews are coming from just 2 posts. On average, we see around 80% coming from 2-3 posts/articles, but this information then allowed us to focus in on the numerous pages highlighted above.

Conclusion

The beauty of web metrics is that you can translate what is important in your marketing strategy into buckets of vital data. There are lots of interesting things you can integrate within Google Analytics, but you need to prevent yourself from going around in circles not finding what you're looking for because you didn't determine your KPIs in the first place.

Start with your implementation plan, move on to the technical setup and requirements, and remember that you will need to continuously evaluate your setup and measurement accuracy to establish Google Analytics as a key business tool at the top level.

About the Author: Duncan Colman is Founder and Inbound Marketing Strategist at Spike Digital. Spike specialise in ecommerce & international SEO, pay-per-click advertising management and conversion rate optimisation.

We Just Made Five Big Improvements To The Kissmetrics People Search

The Kissmetrics People Search is one of our most popular reports, and today we're announcing some major improvements that make it even better.

Here's a quick rundown of the improvements:

1. You can find people who took actions in a specific order


2. You can set a date range for each condition


3. You can tie properties to events


4. You can search by marketing channel


5. You can search by numeric values

Now, let's dive into each one of these to see how it will help you optimize your marketing.

Improvement 1. Find People Who Took Actions in a Specific Order

Let's say you're a SaaS marketer and you want to know how effective your case studies are at closing sales. With Kissmetrics People Search, you can find people who downloaded a case study and then signed up. You'll also be able to find people who did not sign up even after downloading a case study. Here's how we would set that up in the new People Search:

Let's first name our report. We'll call it “Signups From Case Study.” We'll search for people who took these actions in order:

We'll set the date range for the month of March during 2016. And we'll add the first action (event), which is “downloaded customer case study at least 1 time”:

We'll add the second action (event), which is “signed up exactly 1 time”:

We'll add a column to this search to see which marketing channel people came from during the same month:

We'll click “Run report” and get the list of people:

This is a list of all the people who downloaded a case study and then signed up. We can modify the report to look at the people who did not sign up, or we can add more columns to get more data.

People Search previously had the ability to find people who had done two events, but it couldn't specify the order of the events. So, in this example, we would have found people who had done these two events, but some of the people might have signed up first and then downloaded a case study later. This is a big improvement, and it's one our customers have been asking for.

Now let's move on to the next improvement, which we've already highlighted in this example.

Improvement 2. Set a Date Range for Each Condition

With this new addition, you'll be able to answer questions like:

Of the people who made a purchase during the month of January 2016, who came from an ad campaign during our Fall 2015 marketing campaign?

Here's how our report setup looks:

We'll click “Run report” and get our list of people. We've also added a column for the name of the campaign each person came from (if applicable):

We see that 134 people purchased in January after having visited the site from September 27 – October 31. We're looking at the first 10 people, but there are many more people to view. We can expand our list, or we can export the data to a CSV.

By contrast, Mixpanel does not let you go outside a 90-day date range. Additionally, you have to keep your entire report within 90 days. So, for example, you cannot find people who may have visited your site in September and then went on to sign up in February.

Improvement 3. Tie Properties to Events

Imagine you're a marketer for an e-commerce clothing company. Your designers released a new t-shirt for the summer collection, and it was your job to market and sell the product. You got your copywriter and web designers to write up and create beautiful emails and product pages, and you refined your checkout funnel. There was little friction between the email announcing the new t-shirt and making a purchase.

Now, you want to find people who viewed the product page from the email and went on to purchase. You're also interested in knowing who did not purchase even after viewing the product page.

This is possible with the new People Search. The first event we'd set up would be for viewing the page URL for the new t-shirt. Let's say it's example.com/new-summer-shirt/.

Here's how that first event would look with People Search:

We'll also add a condition (property) for people who have purchased that summer shirt. Here's our report criteria:

We're searching for people who visited the summer t-shirt promo page and purchased the shirt. Since this is a fairly new marketing campaign, our date range is set to “Any time.” We can also look for people who did not purchase so that we can remarket to them with new offers.

Additionally, we can add a column to the search results and select Channel to see where the people came from (paid, email, organic search, etc.). This brings us to the next improvement.

Improvement 4. Search by Marketing Channel

We introduced the channels property a couple of years ago with the goal of helping marketers quickly identify where their most valuable customers come from. This property can be used in the Funnel, Cohort, and Revenue reports, and now People Search. And the best part is, it's automatically tracked in Kissmetrics.

There are three options in the Channels property. There is Channel, which puts visitors in one of these seven channels:

• Direct – Visits from direct referrers, typing your site into the browser, or bookmarks


• Organic – Visits from search engines


• Referral – Visits from 3rd party


• Email – Visits from emails


• Paid – Visits from Paid sources such as cpc, cpm, display, ppc, and more


• Social – Visits from social networks/sites


• None

There is also Channel: Origin, which shows the Channel and the original referring URL/domain or campaign name.

And there is Origin. This is the original URL or campaign name.

To see how marketers can use the Channels feature, let's examine a common scenario:

Let's say you're the Director of Marketing for a medium-sized SaaS company. Your job is demand generation – it's up to you to deliver quality leads to the sales team. You've recently launched a co-marketing campaign with another company in your industry. Your partner has agreed to feature your company in two of their blog posts. You're tracking these links with a UTM, and now you want to find the people who visited your site via a blog post and then purchased. Once you have the list of people, they'll be put on an email segment list with special offers from both you and your partner.

The blog posts went live on March 1. It's now April 1, and you want to see if you've received any signups from the posts.

You have two campaign name UTMs:

partner-blog-post-bio

partner-blog-post-body

Now, let's find these people with the Channels property.

To do this in People Search, you'll need to set up a few things. Here's the first step:

We're looking for people who visited the site from one of our partner's blog posts and then signed up. This needed to happen during the month of March.

We'll add a column to the search results that will show us who came from partner-blog-post-bio and who came from partner-blog-post-body.

We'll click “Run report” and get our list of people, as well as their Channel: Origin.

We can also use Channel: Origin in a Funnel Report, where we'd be able to see how well each marketing campaign moves through our conversion funnel.

Now, let's get to our last improvement, which adds the ability to search by numeric values.

Improvement 5. Search by Numeric Values

Let's say you're a marketer for an e-commerce company and you just wrapped up your Christmas sale. You want to find all the customers who made a purchase over $150 so you can send them a follow-up email with a new offer. These are high-value customers who make bigger purchases, so the more of them coming back to make purchases, the more money you will make.

With People Search, you'll find people who purchase during a specific time frame. Here's how our report criteria looks:

We're looking for people who purchased at least once from Nov 15 – Dec 23. The naming for each event and property will vary for each e-commerce company, but ultimately, the report should have these conditions.

We'll add a column to this data in order to include the order value amount. But, for purposes of illustrating the totaling feature in the column for order value, we'll go ahead and set the order value to “total value,” which means that People Search will add up all the purchase values during this date range. So, if a person made 3 purchases of $20 each, their order value will show as $60.

Here is the list of customers who purchased during the sale, as well as the amount of money they spent:

From here, we can export the data to a CSV and upload it to our email marketing program so that we can try to get repurchases from these customers.

If they use a coupon code in these repurchases, we can track that as a property and use it in various reports to see if people activate the code.

Take the New & Improved People Search for a Spin

So there you have it, the five big improvements we made to People Search. If you're already a customer, you can log in to your account and start using the new People Search. If you're not a customer but would like more information on People Search and all Kissmetrics has to offer, you can request a personal demo.

How Email Segmentation Sustains Customer Loyalty

Research shows that segmented email campaigns possess a 14.25% higher open rate compared to non-segmented campaigns.

Targeted messages grab people's attention. And SaaS teams must direct that attention to converting buyers into loyal customers.

“While enticing new customers is important, no marketing channel can boost loyalty the way that email can. Since people typically sign up for email to be notified about promotions you can use that information to increase sales,” says David Marinaccio, email marketing manager at Active Web Group.

Segmentation is an effective method to deliver the right message to the right person. It helps personalize the shopping experience to increase sales.

Let's explore how your next email campaign can retain more customer relationships.

The Value of Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is how your business will continue to grow.

Satisfied consumers enjoy purchasing your products, like telling their friends about your brand, and don't mind sending a promotional tweet. And when necessary, loyal customers will even defend your brand name during a PR mishap.

To achieve customer loyalty, your SaaS needs to offer unprecedented value to your buyers. You're not selling a product; instead, your team is providing an experience.

“Customer loyalty is built upon consistently positive, high-value experiences with a brand, often exceeding customer expectations. Loyalty goes beyond satisfying needs or wants. It's an emotional connection to a brand that customers love and will happily return for,” writes Donna Peeples, Founder and Chief Engagement Officer of Motivated, Inc.

In the graphic below, you'll discover a few effective strategies to improve your customer loyalty. One of my favorites is creating a WOW factor in customer engagements. It's vital to give people something they weren't expecting. Then, you exceed their expectations.

Image Source

Convince and Convert reports that “44% of email recipients made at least one purchase in the last 12 months based on a promotional email.” Use email to build a loyal consumer base and boost sales.

Email is an intimate channel where your company can talk directly to the buyer. That's why it's important to ensure that your marketing messages resonate with the individual.

Research says that “41% of people said they purchase more from retailers that send personalized emails based on past browsing and buying behavior.”

Your customers don't like receiving mass emails. They want information catered to their needs.

There is value in customer loyalty. Look toward email as a way to build that loyalty.

Segmentation Possibilities

Segmentation is “the process of dividing your customers up into different groups who share a number of similar characteristics.”

And loyalty segmentation is how you group customers based on their interaction and engagement with your content. It's about going beyond demographics and locations.

Use segmentation to support personalized email campaigns. The goal is to target your buyer's behavior and interests.

A study reported that “mailings targeted to loyalty program members outperformed overall bulk mailings, with open rates 40% higher, click rates 22% higher and transaction rates 29% higher.”

Pat Flynn, podcast host of Smart Passive Income, suggests discovering the different content types within your audience:

“In the health and fitness industry, for example, there are people who are interested primarily in losing weight, and there are others who are more interested in strength training. Within strength training, there are those who are interested in looking beefed up, while there are others who are in it to look lean.”

Learning your buyer's likes and habits is mandatory. It will allow your team to deliver messages that matter to the customer. Therefore, saving your company both time and money.

Below is an example from MyBinding. This business offers different promotional incentives based on the customer's purchase history.

Churning customers receive a larger discount (15%) to lure them back into the purchase cycle. Since the best customers are more likely to purchase again, they receive a slightly smaller incentive, 10%.

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What segmentation mix works well for your SaaS? Find out how you can bring more value to a specific audience.

Loyalty-Targeted Emails

Your SaaS might be missing opportunities to build customer loyalty. It's because you are not sending triggered emails to your segmented groups.

Triggered emails are automated messages sent in response to your customer's actions. And while you're probably using them to send welcome emails, research shows that triggered emails are underused.

MarketingSherpa revealed that “only 24% use them for date-activated trigger messages (such as renewal dates or birthdays), and only 18% use them to acknowledge website behaviors.”

Start reviewing your email data. Gain a better understanding of how your team can benefit from triggered emails.

Derek Buntin at Adonis Media, says, “Use email analytics to determine which customers are opening emails but not making a purchase. Then, send these users follow-up emails with the incentive.”

Priceline tailors emails to consumers' on-site behaviors. For instance, when consumers book a trip, the brand will send an email welcoming them home after their vacation is over. And the email includes a discount toward their next trip.

Image Source.

With a loyalty-targeted focus, your team can send customers triggered emails about redemption reminders, requests for feedback, and invitations to VIP programs.

“Loyalty-focused campaigns can span the entire customer life cycle, from the initial entry to program renewal notifications and reminder messages. They also tend to perform better than standard promotional mailings in terms of customer response and revenue,” says John Fetto, a senior B2B marketing manager.

Email marketing doesn't mean sending anything and everything to buyers. You're striving for retention. So, develop email campaigns with the power of triggered messages.

Sustainable Relationships

Because all consumers aren't created equal, customization is essential.

And customers are willing to help build personalized experiences. However, they want something in return.

Loyalty360 “noted that 67 percent of U.S. adults would be willing to give companies access to basic personal information in exchange for better service or products.”

It's doesn't matter how great the relationships are if your products don't deliver. Always be mindful of how you can improve your platform, features, and customer service.

Be open and honest with consumers. Transparency helps your organization build sustainable relationships.

“We are fighting against years of people feeling like companies are somehow screwing them over with hidden pricing and confusing return policies. The only way to establish trust and loyalty is to show your cards,” writes Mikkel Svane, founder and CEO of Zendesk.

Focus on a long-term strategy by testing and experimenting. Measure your results and derive new insights from your findings.

You may find out that everyone isn't on the same page. But that's fine. Just make the necessary adjustments.

Image Source.

“…[E]mail marketing's biggest challenge: the fact that there is a lot of competition for the same eyeballs. Personalization of your email messages will help your company stand out and generate more attention, higher levels of online engagement and lead to more in-store sales,” says Melanie Franke, Content Marketing Specialist at G/O Digital.

Don't settle for generic or dishonest messaging. Your customers deserve better.

Segment to Sustain

Customer loyalty strengthens your brand. With the power of email segmentation, SaaS teams are able to create personalized experiences.

Loyalty can lead to increases in brand awareness and sales. Segmenting includes differentiating customers by interests and behaviors. And a powerful email campaign strategy is grounded in data-driven triggered emails.

Segment to sustain customer loyalty.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

Call Tracking: A Key Component in Campaign Marketing Analytics

It almost goes without saying that analytics are crucial to developing successful online marketing campaigns. You know all about Kissmetrics, Google Analytics, Google AdWords and everything in between. But even if you're already tracking all of your online activity, you may still not have a full grasp of lead and conversion data unless you're also tracking phone calls.

Phone call tracking is the missing piece of the marketing analytics puzzle, allowing marketers to alleviate attribution blind spots and better understand their audience by analyzing which digital and offline marketing tactics are causing customers to pick up the phone and call. By integrating call tracking software, you'll be able to get a 360-degree view of customer behavior and gain a better sense of how to effectively reach your core audience.

How Call Recording Can Help You Get to Know Your Customer

It's true that you may already have a decent idea of who your customer is. However, call tracking can offer you additional powerful insights and information on your customer base, allowing you to understand your target audience like never before.

It's pretty straightforward, but the first and most obvious benefit of call tracking is the ability to listen to your customer firsthand. By recording phone calls, you're able to determine how effective your customer service is and identify where you could use some improvement, all with the ultimate goal of boosting customer satisfaction and conversion rates. You'll also be able to better qualify leads and determine which callers require more attention in order to turn them into loyal customers.

In addition, call recording allows you to listen in on your employees and their interactions with leads and customers. By honing in on your sales team's conversations with callers, you'll be able to better analyze their tactics and identify areas that require attention to increase conversion rates.

Finally, call recording allows you to get a better idea of where to spend your efforts, whether that's on your staff, your marketing assets or your product development. Whatever the case may be, recording phone calls can help businesses exceed their own expectations and achieve success.

When Call Tracking Isn't Best For Your Company

Is there any instance where call recording isn't beneficial to a business? It's tough to say, but for smaller businesses just starting out, they may not have the budget or time to implement call recording quite yet. Also digital businesses that primarily rely on the Web for customer conversion and service may not see a great benefit. In all of these cases, free tools such as Google Analytics and AdWords may make more sense before diving into all the features of call analytics software.

Call Tracking and Marketing Campaigns

Beyond call recording, call tracking software offers a variety of impressive features that can give you a clearer picture of the overall success of your marketing strategy. Among these include keyword level tracking, campaign level tracking and multi-channel attribution tracking. These features allow you to examine and analyze each of your campaigns with unparalleled precision in order to see actual correlations between your marketing efforts and results. By gathering such in-depth insights, you'll be able to better track your individual marketing initiatives and determine which ones are the most successful to your business.

We'll talk about each of these features separately and how they can help you improve your individual campaigns - and ultimately, your business's marketing strategy as a whole.

Keyword Level Tracking

Let's first look at keyword level tracking. This dynamic feature allows you to see which keywords are driving the most phone calls and conversions, which can be exceptionally useful in tracking the success of PPC campaigns. Here's how it works:

1. Your business is assigned a pool of phone numbers that are unique to your company.


2. Whenever a customer finds your business online through a paid ad, they'll see a specific phone number from that pool the entire time they're on your website.


3. When your business receives a phone call, you'll know firsthand which source and keyword were used.


4. Once the call is complete, that phone number is freed up for another person to use.

The benefits of keyword level tracking should be clear. By seeing firsthand which keywords are driving calls, you'll be able to better understand which marketing efforts are working and which ones need to be fine-tuned.

Campaign Level Tracking

Similarly, campaign level tracking allows you to see which marketing campaigns - both online and offline - are driving the most conversions. You'll be able to view data from your phone calls in your call analytics dashboard, so even if you've implemented a non-digital marketing campaign, you can measure its success alongside your online efforts. By analyzing the results of both your digital and offline efforts, you'll be able to get a better grasp of the success of your overall marketing strategy. You can apply tracking at the campaign level to a variety of efforts, including but not limited to print ads, billboards, TV spots, PPC campaigns and Facebook ads, to better understand which campaigns are resonating with your customer base.

Multi-Channel Attribution Tracking

Most customers interact with your business in more ways than one, but it can oftentimes be difficult to track their exact journey from start to finish. Multi-channel attribution bridges that gap, allowing you to track the entire progress of an online lead and effectively measure which online marketing channels lead to offline telephone call conversions.

To paint a picture of how this works, let's say you have a lead who first learns about your business through Google AdWords. They click on the ad, browse your website for a bit then go offline for the day. A few days later they remember visiting your website and decide to visit again, this time finding your site by doing a search or directly typing in the URL. They exit your website, and then a few days later pick up the phone after being retargeted through a paid display ad.

Without multi-channel attribution you would only see the first channel a visitor came through, in this case Google AdWords. Call tracking enabled multi-channel attribution provides the ability to view the entire customer lifecycle and effectively measure which online marketing channels lead to offline call conversions. You not only see the first touch point, but the touch point that resulted in a phone call. This data can be used to optimize campaigns and provide proof of successful marketing campaigns that are driving conversions.

While all of these features offer powerful insights to savvy data-driven marketers, it's important to note that they may not be right for everyone. For business owners who may not be very experienced in analytics, call tracking software might seem like a completely foreign land. And as mentioned before, call analytics may not have great benefit for businesses such as e-commerce companies that drive revenue through clicks and not calls. Be sure to thoroughly weigh your options before integrating call tracking into your marketing strategy.

Call Tracking and Marketing Agencies

Call tracking isn't just beneficial to individual businesses who really want to hone in on their customer base, but it can be crucial in proving ROI for marketing agencies as well. Call tracking makes it easy for agencies to deliver what clients pay for: proven results. Just like the scenarios outlined above, call tracking enhanced lead attribution capabilities empower agencies to show their clients which campaigns are driving valuable phone calls. Moreover, call tracking can help agencies make smarter marketing decisions, which can lead to a reduction in wasteful ad spending and drive better ROI. Better ROI creates happy clients that stay with an agency for a longer period of time.

Agencies also reap benefits by integrating call tracking software with other software applications that they are already using, such as Kissmetrics. Additionally, the leading call tracking providers offer specific features to help agencies serve their clients. These features include white label solutions to provide a seamless agency brand experience, the ability to handle multiple client companies via a single login, custom client reporting, and view-level access to enable clients to access their call analytics dashboard to view their data and see the results for themselves.

Integrating Call Tracking With Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics has partnered with CallRail to deliver call analytics. Integrating with CallRail alleviates attribution blind spots and allows you to see a more complete picture of how your customers are interacting with your company, not just on your website but also through the telephone. You can track which phone numbers generate more calls and deliver more new customers.

With the CallRail Kissmetrics integration, website activity is automatically associated with a phone call without a person needing to collect any identifying information. CallRail is the only call provider that automatically associates phone calls to web visits to phone calls in Kissmetrics. This works beautifully with Kissmetrics's person-based analytics approach.

Integrating CallRail with Kissmetrics is simple two-step process. First, go to the Kissmetrics site settings page and copy your Tracking API.

Then head over to CallRail's Kissmetrics integration page and paste your Kissmetrics API key and click the activate button.

Conclusion

Whether you're a standalone business or a marketing agency, call tracking provides a variety of powerful features that aid you in tracking the success of your marketing campaigns to ultimately improve ROI. By zeroing-in on customer behavior and data, you'll be able to gain a better understanding of your target audience and fine-tune your overall marketing strategy to boost conversions.

About the Author: Lance Weatherby has vast sales and marketing experience with both early stage and high growth technology startups. He is currently Vice President of Marketing for CallRail, an Atlanta based marketing technology company focused on call analytics that offers an integration with Kissmetrics. CallRail's call tracking software is used by more than 30,000 companies and marketing agencies. He can be found on Twitter at @lance.