Tracking Landscape Marketing ROI: An Introduction to Call Tracking, Form Tracking, and Analytics Dashboards
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The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
With modern tracking and data analytics technology, the world of marketing—once gray and mysterious—becomes crystal clear. Today, landscape business owners can see exactly where each and every lead is coming from, and modify their marketing budgets accordingly.
Every lead can be prequalified before you even pick up the phone to say, “Hello.” Your salesperson will know where they’re calling from, what platform they discovered you on, and their journey to “conversion,” the point when they took action to call you up. Add in proper intake questionnaires, and you’ll be spending more time on great leads and less on poor-fit ones. And you can keep tabs on all the different touchpoints and marketing channels that you have set up—all this information will be available live.
To understand how call and form tracking, and supporting analytics can be used to empower your marketing and sales efforts, you’ll need to understand a bit about each. Let’s dive in.
“Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed.”
Call Tracking for Landscaping Businesses
These days, no one is ever too far from their smartphone, even though the “phone” aspect of their device is just an afterthought—secondary to the more fun or useful features like web browsing, email, and social media. But there is an important relationship between the phone and those other functions—a relationship that, if tapped, yields a gold mine for business owners and their marketing efforts.
Put simply, call tracking forms a bridge between those features. It allows businesses to know who’s calling, where they’re calling from, and which ad campaign triggered the call—all information that’s vital to not only your sales team but also for your understanding of true marketing ROI.
According to most studies, incoming calls to your landscaping business are much more valuable in terms of converting prospects to customers than website forms. If you’re not tracking those calls, you’re not helping anyone—not the customer, who expects a tailored experience, and not your company, which relies on customer data to drive sales.
How Call Tracking Works: An Example
Imagine someone—let’s call her Denise—wants to build an outdoor living space with a patio and fireplace. She’s doing research on Google and, in the process, discovers a Google Ad that you or your business purchased. Denise clicks the link, taking her to your company’s website. She clicks around and then responds to a call to action (CTA) that asks her to call a phone number to discuss the project.
Without call tracking, the analytics end the moment Denise picks up the phone. Whatever interaction follows—be it a conversion, further nurturing, or a dead lead—is blind to the behavior that precipitated the call. As a result, you have no way to accurately measure your conversion rates and no way of knowing whether your marketing efforts are paying off.
Thanks to a technology called dynamic number insertion (DNI), call tracking puts that data front and center. DNI refers to the process of tying unique phone numbers to each separate platform or campaign. That means, essentially, having a phone number for Google Ads, another for Facebook Ads, another for offline sources such as vehicle wrapping, maybe another for email marketing, and so on. This way you are learning more about the customer’s journey, which platforms are performing best—even right down to which exact ad is driving the most sales.
But that’s not all. Call tracking can reveal more than just the source platform for a call. It also includes the lead’s name, phone number, and location, with IP data that can track the user all the way back to their initial keyword search.
What Kind of Data Can Call Tracking Provide Landscape Business Owners?
Here’s some of the data that call tracking can provide:
Name, phone number, location: This data is gathered from traditional caller ID data.
The source for the call: This may be a specific Google or Facebook ad campaign, an email newsletter, a lawn care mailer, or whatever unique phone number you supplied to a marketing channel.
The caller’s history: View any previous calls or texts received from the person, as well as tags that sort or prioritize them based on previous interactions.
Additional features allow you to record and transcribe phone conversations, as well as send those who are outside of your area to a toll-free number—yet another way to qualify your inbound leads and save you valuable time.
Combined with the ability to test out different webpages about your services and CTAs you use in your marketing, you can measure and identify the most productive blend of web design, content, branding, and advertising. The whole idea is to allow your sales and marketing experts to focus on what works best.
Form Tracking for Landscapers
Similar to call tracking, form tracking is designed to let you know which marketing channels are producing the most leads. It also prevents inbound leads from falling through the gaps by making you aware of when a promising prospect wants your attention so that you can respond quickly.
Why is it important for outdoor living contractors to respond to inquiries quickly? According to the Harvard Business Review, businesses that respond to a potential customer’s query within an hour are almost seven times as likely to qualify the lead than businesses that wait more than an hour to respond. The number increases to 60 times more than companies that wait more than 24 hours.
The challenge, however, is that leads don’t always arrive during your work hours. Sometimes they arrive in the evenings while owners and sales staff are playing with their kiddos, or on weekends, or when you’re on vacation. Sometimes they arrive all at once and you simply miss the good ones.
Form tracking allows you to receive the full content of inbound queries wherever you are. At Halstead, clients can set it up to receive alerts via phone call, text, or email. And with contextual data—including the marketing channels, keywords, and landing pages that drove people to your site—you’re even more empowered to qualify, nurture, or convert those leads.
So, you will know which of your channels is producing the most leads (and which are not), and you’ll have the ability to monitor customer interest. All the touchpoints are at your fingertips when it comes time to chat with the customer—from the first ad they clicked, to the report they downloaded, to the form they submitted.
Live Analytics Dashboards for Landscapers
What’s important is having this information presented in a way that is convenient and clear. Live analytics dashboards, like those offered by Halstead, are used to ensure that all that information is available to you when you need it. You can use your dashboard to analyze customer data, providing both focused and overhead views of your marketing spend. With live data, you can bring all your digital efforts into one place, including:
Call and form tracking: Monitor campaign performance, caller names, phone numbers, and other call and form lead data that we covered in this article.
Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram ads campaigns performance: All your click-through-rates, cost-per-clicks, live ads previews, and budget spend over time are available in one spot.
SEO metrics: Search engine optimization is a critical part of any landscape marketing system. And tracking traffic and keyword rankings is imperative to achieving ROI. All of that data is presented in one location.
Reviews, email marketing, and more: The goal of dashboards is to bring your entire marketing strategy into one hub. It becomes your NASA control center of everything marketing.
“We must move from numbers keeping score to numbers that drive better actions.”
Why It’s Important to Know What’s Working
Ultimately, call tracking, form tracking, and live analytics show you what is and isn’t working. These tools empower your landscape company to grow by informing you of customer trends and behavior, but a successful campaign ultimately hinges on how you use the data. If deployed effectively, you will be able to do any of the following:
Track Marketing ROI
It’s tempting to get caught up in social media and vanity metrics like click-through rates and assume you’ve got a handle on what’s working. Call and form tracking offer a far more intimate picture of where leads are coming from and, more importantly, why they’re calling your business.
Notice Patterns
With call tracking, form tracking, and live analytics, your marketing team can observe patterns about your target customers. Whether you’re a dealer, manufacturer, or contractor in the landscaping industry, those patterns tell you when and where people are engaging with your business. You can use that data to staff your support team accordingly.
Refine Marketing Strategies
Maybe you notice a sudden surge in calls after the launch of a new Google Ad campaign. Not all of those leads are going to be high quality. With better data, you can qualify inbound leads before picking up the phone. Over time, you’ll learn what’s working for your company and refine your efforts accordingly.
Narrow or Widen Your Audience
Maybe you’re getting a whole bunch of calls from a particular area and only a few from a nearby city. With better inbound lead data, your design/build company can focus its marketing efforts on certain communities.
Track Volume
Tracking how many calls and forms are coming in allows you to further curate your marketing campaigns. For example, one marketing campaign may draw in one call, while another may bring over 20. Comparing these will help you figure out where your money needs to be going.
