The name “Dynamic Number Insertion” sounds intimating.
When I was first pitched this type of trackable number, my initial thought was to instantly hand the project off to my developer.
But I’m happy I decided to implement the entire process myself because it helped me realize how much of a game changer this phone tracking technology will be for my PPC clients.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Dynamic Number Insertion, it’s a process that marketers use to measure the impact of digital efforts on inbound phone calls. When a lead clicks through to your site from any advertisement, dynamic number insertion technology displays a number that’s unique to the specific search engine, web page, keyword, or other source the traffic came from.
The reason this is so valuable from a PPC perspective is because it paints the entire picture of how your keyword is performing, and it allows for marketers to make data driven decisions that would not be available without this tracking capability.
Speaking of painting, let’s look at an example of how my agency was able to implement this Dynamic Number Insertion process for a painting company to improve their PPC performance.
Implementing Dynamic Number Insertion
As a local painting service, the company wanted to get business owners thinking about repainting the interior/exterior of their offices prior to the spring, their busy season, and the keyword that generated the most clicks in their campaign was “Dublin Commercial Painting Company.” (Dublin is a suburb of Columbus with a large corporate presence and one of the top areas for Sharper Painting from a commercial perspective.)
Prior to implementing the dynamic trackable number, we were able to see all of the conversions that came through the contact form on our landing page. We were also able to analyze all of the phone calls from the PPC campaign (which was over 50% of the lead volume). The issue that we were having was that we were NOT able to see what keyword the phone calls were coming from until we implemented the dynamic trackable phone number.
Even though we knew what our overall cost per lead was, dynamic number insertion would allow us to accomplish the following from a keyword perspective:
- Pause underperforming keywords.
- Invest more money into top performing keywords.
- Make an educated business decision to pause a “fringe keyword” or keep the keyword running. (I classify a “fringe keyword” as a keyword within our campaign that is slightly above our desired cost per lead but we don’t pause because it generates good lead volume.)
Below is a before and after example of one of the landing pages where the dynamic number is implemented. You’ll notice the (877) number is how it appears prior to the DNI insertion. After the DNI code is placed on the backend of your site, you can see the local phone number populating.
Within Adwords, it might say that my cost per conversion/lead on the keyword “Dublin Commercial Painting Company” was $50 per lead. But again, this doesn’t tell the entire story since phone calls aren’t taken into consideration. This is why dynamic number insertion is so valuable.
By integrating the DNI within Google Analytics, I’m able to see how many phone calls (over 30 seconds) were generated from the “Dublin Commercial Painting Company” keyword. It ended up that by having this data at my fingertips, I know that our cost per lead dropped in half to $25 per lead based on the call volume coming from AdWords.
Without this phone call keyword data, I would have likely paused this campaign because it was a “fringe keyword.” Instead, I’m going to invest more money into it because I’ve deemed it as a top performer.
To set all of this up, I used Convirza, and they’ve been fantastic. There are also plenty of other vendors out there as well, and Google even has its own call tracking feature built into AdWords.
The main thing to take away from this article is that if you don’t have dynamic number insertion for your PPC campaigns, then you’re not painting the entire picture of your Adwords performance. Dynamic number insertion provides more data and gives you a better idea about how well your campaign is performing so you know whether or not your campaigns are successful and profitable, which also means you can report more accurate results to your clients.
About the Author
Jason Parks is the owner of The Media Captain, a Digital Marketing Agency based out of Columbus, Ohio, that offers online advertising, SEO, social media, web development, and video production services.
