Call Tracking Facts Every Dealership Should Know

[Dev Basu (blog)]

Hey Stephen - Nice to meet you too. The workaround you're suggesting is good for the long run but does cause some pretty harsh short term pain in the rankings. Effectively, a dealer would need to use the call tracking # in their Places profile and rebuild or edit any existing citation data they have to get the records in order. Even after building new citations or editing existing ones, we've seen Places take up to 3 months to adjust to the new data.

It's a double-edged sword for the first 6 months or so of undertaking a call tracking # in your places profile.

1) The major pro is that you know where your leads are coming from.

2) The major con is that if you depend on search engines for the majority of your leads, a loss in rankings could result in less overall calls than before using a call tracking #.

 

[joe.pistell]

Stephen, You're a vendor, you track phone calls for a living, so I can understand how tracking every call makes sense to you. But... IMO, your core product is not to track calls, so much as it's your ability to improve dealers decision making. Based on that, I'll challenge you on a few fronts.

I see little need track calls made from Google Places for 2 reasons.

#1). It costs us next to nothing to use it.
#2). Free= No need to measure against another platform to choose one over the other.

Ok.. If it's free, then I have little to worry about. But, on the other hand, the ability to track the call counts and call quality of the referrals to my website from Google Places, now you've got my attention!

Google Places has 2 different visitors that parallel the old phone books, White pages & Yellow pages. The real opportunity in Google Places is not it's "white pages" traffic, it's from the "yellow pages" like traffic (white pages = dealer name, where as "Used Trucks" is a yellow pages like request). The competition for these Yellow Pages like Google Places SERPs is very strong, few dealers make it onto the maps and to those that do make it, have no idea how they got there, yet, it's a very very rich source of income for them. Lastly, trying to insert tracking numbers into Google Places could ruin your position or make you invisible for ...gulp... months & months. It's possible it could take you years to re-gain that 3-6 months of lost revenue.

My $0.02
Dealers should be working with Local SEO experts like Dev Beasu to optimize their Google Places visibility and they should track this investment with Stephen's Century Interactive!

p.s. Welcome to Dealer Refresh Stephen, you're now "hardened by fire"

 

[joe.pistell]

Stephen, You're a vendor, you track phone calls for a living, so I can understand how tracking every call makes sense to you. But... IMO, your core product is not to track calls, so much as it's your ability to improve dealers decision making. Based on that, I'll challenge you on a few fronts.

I see little need track calls made from Google Places for 2 reasons.

#1). It costs us next to nothing to use it.
#2). Free= No need to measure against another platform to choose one over the other.

Ok.. If it's free, then I have little to worry about. But, on the other hand, the ability to track the call counts and call quality of the referrals to my website from Google Places, now you've got my attention!

Google Places has 2 different visitors that parallel the old phone books, White pages & Yellow pages. The real opportunity in Google Places is not it's "white pages" traffic, it's from the "yellow pages" like traffic (white pages = dealer name, where as "Used Trucks" is a yellow pages like request). The competition for these Yellow Pages like Google Places SERPs is very strong, few dealers make it onto the maps and to those that do make it, have no idea how they got there, yet, it's a very very rich source of income for them. Lastly, trying to insert tracking numbers into Google Places could ruin your position or make you invisible for ...gulp... months & months. It's possible it could take you years to re-gain that 3-6 months of lost revenue.

My $0.02
Dealers should be working with Local SEO experts like Dev Beasu to optimize their Google Places visibility and they should track this investment with Stephen's Century Interactive!

p.s. Welcome to Dealer Refresh Stephen, you're now "hardened by fire"

 

[Dev Basu (blog)]

I really like your logic Joe, with the caveat that Places does need some form of lead tracking if you are paying for Local SEO management. We provide that to all the dealers we work with through a combination of a) Google Place Page Impression + Action Reporting b) Google Analytics Goal Reports c) Call Tracking via Dynamic Javascript.

 

[Ryan Leslie]

@Joe Pistell,

If that was "hardened by fire" you used a Birthday candle. Why didn't you bring the HellFire and Volcano plumes like you did with Lightnup?

 

[Stephen Cravens]

Joe, are you sure your last name isn't spelled "Pistol?" ha.

If you're a dealer, are you okay being in the dark on where 20% of your phone leads are coming from? Oh, it's not 20%, how would you even know? Say it's only 10%; 1 in 10 calls into your dealership aren't being tracked, so you don't know which employee handled the call, what the prospect was calling about, or how long it took to answer the call. Did your receptionist make a prospect hold for 2 minutes?

Call tracking is more than ad effectiveness. Yes, I'm biased, Joe, but one thing I've observed that successful dealerships have in common is they track every call coming into their store. The GM has the best view on what's working because he's standing at the top of the mountain.

 

[joe.pistell]

Stephen,

I'll say it again: "...IMO, your core product is not to track calls, so much as it's your ability to improve dealers decision making..."

Surely, we agree with this, that's what your reply is all about.

In your reply, you've mixed 2 different topics.

#1). Ad source measurement
#2). Sales operations (namely sale processes)

re: Ad source measurement
Sorry Stephen, I am aok with not knowing how many calls a FREE white pages based search is sending to me. Would I like it tracked? Sure, I love to measure everything! But as Dennis Galbraith from Cars.com said, I'll us my own words... not if the tracking number presents risk to my "Yellow Pages" traffic (i.e. "Chevrolet Dealer").

re: Sales operations (namely sale processes)
If Google Places gave me 25% of all incoming phone traffic, I still have 75% of the traffic from which to optimize sales processes from. Thats a truck load of calls to listen to. Heck, we ALL know that we can only listen to a fraction of the incoming calls anyway! (unless you have callrevu.com .

If I were to drill into what I am missing the most from not tracking Google Places listing, it's probably service calls (ala white pages calls). Stephen, you track these calls specifically, am I correct? what are your thoughts?

Lastly, if I may address on last line you wrote:

"...one thing I've observed that successful dealerships have in common is they track every call coming into their store...."

From my seat, this is how I feel about your company:

"...one thing I've observed that dealerships that use Century Interactive have in common is they are very successful...."

Century's reputation is best of class in this arena and i've never laid eyes on your platform!

 

[Stephen Cravens]

Nicely said and way to cap off a great discussion! I hope we get a chance to work together sometime soon.

 

[Alex Jefferson]

Does anyone else have a latency issue when forwarding call tracking numbers to cell phones? Have anyone figured out how to resolve this issue?

 

[Bob]

I do Google Places for a living and I would never, ever use a tracking number on my place page, whether it's local or 800. It will absolutely kill your signal strength ... not only on Google, but on every other site that ranks your listing based on distance, relevance and prominence.

If you're using a tracking number on your Google Place Page, dump it. Get in the habit of asking every customers how they found you. Yes, I mean every customer. If you disagree with me, I can tell you that you have no idea how much business you're loosing from trying to outsmart the local search engines. Dump the tracking number.