The ability to drive phone calls through your online presence gives you a valuable tool for bridging the gap between traditional and digital marketing channels. But consumer paths to conversion are generally not neat and clean, and they rarely occur through the same channel. Call tracking helps you determine which of your campaigns for driving phone calls are the most successful.

While driving phone calls is great, you can learn so much more when you also have access to information about how well your efforts are going, whether you're getting a good return on your investment and how you can improve on your campaign or plan future strategies. Call tracking is easy to implement, but you need to take certain steps to effectively manage phone call referrals and gather data on their success. Here are a few strategies to make call tracking work with your digital marketing campaigns.

Being seen everywhere is something most companies are trying to accomplish. What they (and you) may not realize is that you don't have to choose between digital advertising and TV, radio, or print advertising. You can do both and experience more success because of it. 

Optimizing PPC campaigns for the changing seasons is a great way to generate traffic. But if you want to take advantage of all the possibilities seasonal ads offer, you need to understand that seasonality goes beyond winter, spring, summer, fall and holidays — and bid accordingly. Of course, as Capterra notes, conversion rates vary, but a 2 percent rate is typical with any thoughtfully executed campaign. But optimizing your PPC campaign for seasonality, Search Engine Watch explains, could bring your numbers much higher.

Mine Your Own Data

While you might have to wait a bit in order to gauge the results of search engine marketing and other types of campaigns, you can monitor and adjust most PPC ads within hours, which is ideal for responding to changing audience behavior. Of course preparing for the recurring seasons is important, but changes also can occur on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. This is where your own sales history is key.

"Today we're spending less money, but we're reaching a lot more people." - General Sales Manager, Ferman Automotive - Tampa. 

One of digital marketing's greatest assets is that it allows advertisers to do just that - spend advertising budgets in really strategic ways that target the people most likely to make a purchase. In today's marketplace, the competition is tough, particularly for automotive dealers, so finding a digital marketing partner that can hone in on what will make your business stand out from the pack, reach more customers, and drive more sales is critical to success. 

In order for your company to be as successful as possible, you must constantly strive to improve your search engine rankings. By doing so, you can expand your reach and increase your traffic. Google and other search engine platforms wield incredible value as outlets for both organic and paid search.

The Differences Between SEO and SEM

Many marketers understand that both search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) serve an important purpose in their efforts to reach potential customers. But SEO and SEM, for all of their apparent similarities, can have very different functions and results. The most basic difference is that SEM requires a form of payment, while SEO is free. In addition, SEM offers high visibility and search result prominence, while SEO is more fluid and natural in how it provides results. Even the timeliness of generating ROI are very different: While SEM can turn around results immediately, SEO takes time, patience and diligence to pay off.

Every business participating in any kind of advertising wants pretty much the same thing - results. 

There are a wide array of results that businesses are after, and there are just as many solutions to drive those results. Better Hearing Center of Austin wanted to increase the number of patients coming through the door, so we leveraged our expertise as a Google Premier SMB Partner to create dynamic paid search campaigns that delivered the results they were looking for. But we'll let them tell you more about that...

Lead generation has become one of the top goals of digital marketing. Companies are eager to use digital channels to expand their reach among an audience, increase their client base and generate new revenues. But many brands — particularly young ones that are still working to build a solid consumer base — find themselves struggling to effectively and consistently generate these leads. By employing a few proven strategies to generate more leads, these brands can slowly increase their consumer interactions and build toward a more lucrative stream of clients. Here are three key strategies that encourage user action and increase conversions.

1. Use Paid Search

Paid search is a very valuable source of leads. But, due to competition, the top keywords in your industry may be too expensive to pursue. As such, you should do a little research to find strong, relevant keywords and phrases that are lower volume and therefore face less competition. By doing so, you can find an affordable way to drive potential customers to your website — because when those lower-volume key phrases are searched, you'll rank very high.

When it comes to keyword best practices, the main rule is that the rules are always changing. However, the idea that user experience is king still resonates, and that's where the main conundrum lies: What makes a good user experience is a concept that search engines continue to refine and redefine, which explains why, even with paid search marketing, a top position is not guaranteed. There is no magic bullet to get a higher search ranking, but you can do your best to stay on top of the game with these keyword best practices.

1. Go With the Flow

Companies have always tried to influence consumers who are already prospects, and with the widespread availability of information available to consumers on the Internet, the ability to make those connections is much stronger. Google points out that your keywords should reflect the different queries that could help someone find your site when they're searching. Think of your keywords as your customers' verbalization of the problems they're trying to solve, and create content around relevant answers. For example, if you sell women's evening shoes, posts about trends in evening wear will draw a wider range of prospects and give you more options for keywords.

Paid search advertising can be misleading in its apparent simplicity. With a little experience in running paid campaigns through search engines, you will quickly come to realize that there is a reliable set of best practices governing this campaign channel. Even better, there are tangible methods for measuring returns, which simplifies the task of gauging the campaign. When you're driving a return, you can call the campaign a success.

But a deeper look into paid ad practices reveals that certain pitfalls could be severely limiting those returns, and, in some cases, may be setting you up for diminishing returns down the road. Maximizing opportunity is a critical component of paid search, and it often requires the involvement of a paid search marketing expert or a firm dedicated to implementing these strategies.

If your business isn't using Google Analytics to examine its digital marketing practices, you're probably behind the curve on optimizing for the online market. Analytics has become a major tool for brands trying to expand their reach, spur engagement and increase revenue through online outlets, and Google Analytics is the foundational application that most other analytics programs are designed to complement.

For brands new to this tool, though, figuring out how to use Google Analytics can be daunting. While the initial draw of Google Analytics is that it's free, it's also an easy-to-navigate introduction into the world of analytics, making it a great starting tool for companies.

With this platform, you can evaluate your campaign success according to simple metrics that offer digestible insights into what's going well and what needs improvement. Here's a quick rundown of its benefits and best practices.