If you ask most Singapore business owners what they want from their search engine marketing, most will respond with the same answer: increase conversions and decrease cost per conversion. However, when a Singapore business owner wants to drive calls with their PPC spending, then things tend to become a little complicated. You see, for businesses that have services which exceed $500, it’s using PPC to drive calls is a very common technique. In these cases, the stakes are much higher.

This is often the case in industries such as insurance, finance, travel, and home services. In these industries conversions usually take place over the phone. So Singapore marketers are willing to spend a considerable amount of money to drive high-intent shoppers to make a call.

But here’s the problem, there are several potential challenges for marketers who drive their prospects across channels, specifically from online to offline, and then digital to the phone. Here are five common mistakes Singapore marketers make when attempting to drive calls with PPC.

Using the market budget to drive support calls

A lot of Singapore marketers wonder if they’re PPC dollars are driving calls to the support call centre. Believe it or not, this happens all of the time. Whenever a customer needs help and then searches for your company on Google, they will often choose to call the first number that they see. And in many cases, this is the number that is listed in your paid search ad–that one that is meant to drive conversions not customer support calls.

If this is one of your concerns, then there is something that you should take time to consider. If your business is in a high value industry, meaning you drive prices that require high prices PPC words, then your marketing team is losing financially. Not only that, but it is also having a negative impact on customer experience because all of their calls are going to the wrong location. Each time someone calls for help, they must be transferred to a new number. And this can be upsetting for the client.

If you would like to avoid these types of scenarios, then you need to make sure that marketing is able to act on call-tracking data. You can do this by leveraging natural language understanding, or NLU, and advanced artificial intelligence technology. In this way, you will be able to speed up and digitise your feedback loop between your contact centre and your company’s marketing teams. Instead of having to manually listen to calls, marketing will be able tap into real-time voice analytics, automatically understand the behaviour and intent of the caller and then integrate all of those insights into to your digital advertising platforms. This shared data set will help establish a foundation for better cooperation between your marketing and support teams.

Not designing your ads to attract calls

It isn’t enough to simply list your phone number on your paid search ad. Poor ad design is a huge reason why Singapore marketers fail to drive calls. At best, they receive calls that are of low-quality.

If you would like to drive calls from high-intent shoppers then you need to use language that makes it clear why these individuals should make a call. Let’s say that your company specialises in plumbing installations and your main goal is to get more estimate appointments. In this case, your ad would say, “Call Now for a Free Plumbing Installation Estimate!”

If you try to capture audiences that are too large, then this will only result in bad calls. So keep in mind that with call-only ads you don’t have the luxury of a headline. You only have a URL and two description lines to work with. So make sure that your copy is concise and aligned with your specific goals. If you would like to get more out of your space,  then you can also use your URL to display call to actions as well as other information.

Not optimising your campaigns for calls

This may seem like an obvious thing to do, but there are many Singapore businesses who assume that all ads are the same. However, in order to drive calls, you need to remember that campaigns that drive calls will require an entirely different approach than those that drive clicks. So take time to dig into reports and look at the keywords that are driving the most phone calls. Not only should you count the number of calls that you have received, but also the qualifiers such as call duration. This will help you to better determine the number of conversions you received.

You should then optimise your bids to ensure that your keywords are generating the highest quality calls and that it will get to the top ad position. You should also consider increasing your PPC spend. Calls typically convert at 10 times the rate of clicks and the conversions are usually more valuable. This means that increasing your ad spend on your call campaigns may be worth a little extra investment.

Missing peak times

In most cases, the call volume tends to fluctuate throughout the day. It’s very unlikely that someone will call for a spa treatment at 2 a.m. on a Monday morning. However, this may change by 10 a.m.

So perform a sem analysis on all of your data in Google Analytics, Google Adwords, and any other third party tool that you frequently use. You can then confirm whether or not these calls are of quality. Pay attention to the duration of the call. You may also use a call intelligence platform in order to get deeper conversation analytics so so that you will be able to determine exactly what happens on each of the calls. Finally, increase your bid modifiers so that you can make sure your call ads will appear at those specific times.

No call visibility

How long does it usually take your marketing organisation to get actionable data from your calls? Does it take a week? Does it take a month? Perhaps you never get data from your calls.

This happens to be one of the biggest problems for Singapore marketers. They invest a huge chunk of their budget in paid search so that they can drive calls, however, if the customer goes offline to call them then they never know what happened. Either that or they don’t receive the data until days or weeks later. This is a lot of wasted time.

Even if you are able to record this call as a conversion, you still have no data on the keywords that were used or how you can retarget this person. And this means you could be using keywords that are not working and turning off the one that actually does work. Not only is this bad for your budget, but it also results in a bad customer experience.

Phone conversations can offer a lot of insight about your customers, what they need and their preferences. You can use tools like Invoca to help with these types of blind spots. They help to cut out the guessing game.

Conclusion

If you want to drive calls to your business, then you must be willing to invest time into creating the perfect ad. We have just discussed the most common mistakes that Singapore business owners tend to make. By working to avoid them, you can get a achieve more conversions and a better ROI.