How Progrexion Created a 40 Percent Sales Lift By Connecting Call and Digital Data

Marketing pioneer John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” It’s a feeling we became all too familiar with a few years ago at Progrexion. While our marketing team certainly wasn’t blowing half of its budget, we knew that our search advertising was underperforming, and we were missing half of the data we needed to improve our campaigns. As data-driven marketers, that didn’t sit well.

When potential customers clicked an online ad, a search result, or a social media post and arrived at one of Progrexion’s marketing and consumer websites — lexingtonlaw.com, credit.com, and creditrepair.com — we could easily trace their digital journey and fine-tune campaigns and keywords as needed. When they purchased online, it was all reported back through analytics. But this was lost the moment they picked up the phone, and phone sales are a big part of our business.

You see, finances are personal, and, because of the nature of credit repair, our target consumers are often looking for personalized guidance about how to fix their credit. As a result, we receive a ton of inquiries over the phone, many of which convert to sales. This situation isn’t exactly surprising — across industries, 80 percent of shoppers search products online before purchasing them offline, while click-to-call conversations generate more than $1 trillion yearly in the U.S. alone.

We were hamstrung when it came to testing landing pages and optimizing keyword bidding because we didn’t know how tests were affecting calls and which specific keywords were driving sales on the phone. Therefore, it was critical to connect that call data with our digital data to allow our marketing team to make precise optimizations to digital campaigns that were driving calls.

Once we were able to connect these data sets, we changed our search bidding seven times more often, leading to a 40 percent jump in sales and signups at zero additional cost, among other gains. How we got here will likely resonate with other marketers — especially those who focus on considered purchases, as my team does.

Acknowledging a critical blind spot

For years, we used single dedicated phone numbers for each of our digital marketing initiatives. This situation severely hindered the ROI of our paid search efforts. With every person calling the same number, we didn’t know which keywords drove which calls. While we’d see how the advertising was performing at a campaign level, we couldn’t say exactly how it was doing at a keyword level.

My team discussed methods of bridging this gap ourselves. We thought, “Maybe we utilize a dedicated phone number for each keyword.” But since we bid on thousands of keywords across multiple search engines, that process wasn’t practical.

We found the best solution was to use Invoca’s call tracking and analytics platform to connect our customers’ online journey to the phone call, and have a complete view of this data in Adobe Analytics. This system allowed us to nail down exactly what keywords are effective for driving calls, just like we do with for online.

Here’s how we do it: Adobe creates an anonymized user ID, which stores digital information on unique site visitors. These data points include what publisher or platform led to the visits, the number of visits and their duration, and what level of interest in our products the potential customer has shown up to that point. The Adobe ID passes through Invoca, which populates a unique phone number that allows us to connect the caller to their digital activity. Meanwhile, our internal database tracks sales.

The key is that digital activity, phone calls, and sales are synced. So, after a sales conversion happens on the phone, the transaction data passes through Invoca and shows us what keywords influenced the purchase. These metrics fuel our marketing team’s keyword and landing page optimization, lift ROI, and save us a lot of time.

This intelligence also informs our call center reps about incoming callers. They know what ad the caller saw, what products are of interest, whether they visited our site or filled out a form online, and other insights that markedly improve reps’ ability to convert sales.

Boosting revenue and other key metrics

Since integrating Invoca and Adobe Analytics, we have improved our bidding automation through our media-buying platform, which has led to a 40 percent increase in sales and signups. And to top it off, our cost per acquisition also dropped nine percent. What’s more, we’ve gained 33 percent in time saved, which adds up to around 13 hours a week.

Through conversion optimization, we garnered a nine percent lift in phone-based signups. Suddenly, we could see how our tests and digital creative impacted phone calls. Before, we would have had no idea that the test was driving an increase in valuable phone sales, and — if online sales were not impressive enough — we would have ended it. But it turned out to be a win once we looked at the phone sales and the whole picture.

While these numbers represent important wins for our company, they should inspire all brands. Even in the smartphone era, making calls is one of the top reasons people use their phones. Now, when a customer comes to one of my company’s websites and then picks up the phone, there’s no disconnect and no guesswork. It’s hard to imagine why a marketer today would settle for anything less.

To learn more about how your business could benefit from working with Invoca and Adobe, please visit this site, or give us a call: 844-693-1287.