The Untapped Power of AI and Call Data to Boost Your PPC Performance

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Is your business is investing in PPC and driving calls to transact over the phone? Then you could be missing a huge opportunity to boost your PPC performance. One often-overlooked, yet highly impactful PPC strategy is the integration of call conversion data with AI bidding. During our recent webinar, Hewitt Matthews CEO and Co-Founder, Carl Hewitt was joined by Matt McGillicuddy, Head of Growth Marketing at Infinity, to share how this approach helped one marketing team increase PPC sales conversions by 300%!

Watch the full webinar below or read on to find out more.

Why Phone Calls and Therefore Call Tracking Shouldn’t Be Overlooked

According to Forrester, 84% of marketers report that phone calls have higher conversion rates with larger average order values (AOV) compared to other engagement forms. Phone calls are also said to convert 10-15x more revenue than web leads too, according to BIA Kelsey. That’s not surprising when you consider that a phone call shows a strong signal of intent. Customers will often want to speak to a human when making an important purchase or spending a large amount on a holiday or an insurance policy for example, as Matt highlights in the webinar; “you don’t call a company by accident do you?!… If you’re about to spend £20k on a big family cruise, you’re less likely to be clicking ‘buy now’ on a website… you might have a million and one questions.”

That’s why, at Hewitt Matthews, we’ve partnered with Infinity, a leading call tracking and conversation analytics platform, which helps us boost return on ad spend (ROAS) for our PPC clients that rely on customer calls.

Call tracking can often be neglected in PPC because historically, when a customer moved from an online touchpoint to an offline phone call, valuable data about that customer journey was interrupted or lost. With the current capabilities in call tracking and call conversion data, that doesn’t have to be the case now. We can retain more comprehensive data about offline actions to better drive our PPC decisions and continue those important human interactions with customers over the phone that can be crucial for building trust and relationships and closing sales.

One of the best insights Infinity’s call tracking service offers is the ability to identify if the calls you’re driving and paying for from PPC are genuinely customers who want to buy from you or not. Matt gave the example; “It always amazes me. I think the worst I’ve ever seen is a client that was spending literally millions of pounds a month on paid media and 70% of the calls were service calls, not sales calls. That’s a huge chunk of wasted budget that can be fixed.”

The Growing Role of AI in PPC Bidding

AI has drastically transformed PPC bidding strategies in recent years. In the webinar Carl explains “AI bidding is the process of using machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify users who have the most potential to be high value to you as a business, based on various different signals and characteristics about that user, which AI has picked up from historic data, and matched to the criteria of somebody else who previously was high value to you as a business. It starts to spot similarities, and then knows who to go after on your behalf when you’re entering into an auction with your ads. A lot of people are calling this kind of Google’s black box.” However, there’s a caveat, Carl continues; “Garbage in, garbage out.” AI can only perform as well as the data it’s fed. Without a substantial amount of accurate conversion data it can sometimes make the wrong decisions. The more relevant and accurate the data you provide, the better the AI can optimise your campaigns.

Better Data for Better Bidding

This is where comprehensive call conversion data comes in. Marketers can now utilise advanced capabilities in call tracking that go beyond simply measuring call volume and source. Infinity offers the ability to analyse conversations and identify the quality of each call, whether it resulted in a sale or inquiry, and we can connect that data to the specific keywords and campaigns that drove the call. By adding call conversion data into your PPC campaigns, alongside your other online conversion data, you’re giving AI tools like Google’s Performance Max access to a much larger, more detailed and more valuable data set. We build a better understanding of the full customer journey and create a feedback loop that allows us to optimise PPC campaigns for high-value conversions, not just leads. As Matt pointed out, “You’ll increase your returns by making sure ads are shown to the people who are most likely to convert and spend.”

Case Study: Stoneacre’s Success with Call Tracking and AI

A prime example of how this works in practice is Stoneacre, a motor retailer that needed to get leads into their sales funnel in a cost-efficient manner. But without being able to connect sales calls to revenue, they were relying on incomplete data to make decisions about which activities to sustain, and who to target. By integrating Infinity’s call tracking data and feeding it into their AI-driven bidding strategies, Stoneacre saw remarkable results:

  • 300% increase in PPC sales inquiries
  • 79% increase in conversion rate from clicks to calls
  • 21% increase in average order value (AOV)

The Key Benefits of Optimising Your PPC with Call Data 

As Carl and Matt demonstrated in the webinar, if your call tracking isn’t up to scratch or if you’re not using the insights it provides, you’re missing out on a significant opportunity to optimise your campaigns in several ways. Call tracking helps you attribute call conversions to your PPC campaigns, giving you an accurate view of your successes, and once you have more accurate reporting on conversions you can optimise better, making more efficient bids, lowering costs and increasing sales. These deeper insights can also help inform wider marketing decisions and support your sales team in improving their conversions.

Ready to Take Your PPC campaigns to the Next Level?

As AI supported bidding becomes the new standard, the question isn’t whether to use AI, but how to use it effectively. The key is to feed these tools the best possible data (including call conversions) to build a feedback loop that enables continuous learning and adaptation, keeping your campaigns up to date with fresh and accurate data. As Carl aptly stated, “AI is here to stay… We’re not against AI as marketers. We’re competing against other marketers who are using AI better than us.”

Now is the time to start integrating call conversion data into your bidding strategies. Infinity provides a quality call tracking tool to capture and analyse call data effectively, and here at Hewitt Matthews, we can help you utilise your call conversion data to maximise the full potential of your PPC campaigns, driving more high-quality leads, improving conversion rates, and ultimately increasing revenue.

Get in touch today for a free PPC audit. 

 

 

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