Moe Questions, Moe Discoveries.

 

Moe Ahsan, our digital marketing manager, is always researching and trying to strengthen our company. Recently, through the power of research and deduction, he has solved another digital marketing mystery behind Facebook ads.

Facebook is one of the best social media platforms for businesses and advertisers looking to reach a large and fairly engaged audience. Every day there are hundreds to millions of campaigns running on Facebook for brands large and small. Each one of these campaigns has various objectives, some of the objectives give a call option where marketers can add a “call now” button to their ads. This feature is extremely useful for businesses that see their highest conversion rates through phone calls, as is the case for some of our clients. Recently, Moe and Velocity’s digital marketing team started running multiple campaigns that with a reach objective including a “call now” option on the ads, allowing potential new clients to call directly from Facebook. However, this raised, what we discovered, a big question: How do we track the phone calls made on Facebook? 

“At Velocity, we pride ourselves on being a result-driven firm; for each and every one of our clients, we rely heavily on data and analytics to determine the next steps forward and how to best achieve the highest ROI (Return on Investment). After becoming aware of the lack of Facebook’s ability to measure phone calls, it was imperative for us to find a solution, so I decided to deep dive and see if there was a way to measure phone calls directly through Facebook. I contacted our Facebook representative who also did not have an official Facebook solution to track phone calls, besides maybe setting up a vanity number just for Facebook or using a third-party software which can cost hundreds of dollars. I decided to find an alternative since vanity numbers and third-party software are not always viable options. In my research, I studied the definition of a Link Click and how it differs from a Click.”

Link Clicks according to Facebook are “the number of clicks on links within the ad that led to destinations or experiences, on or off Facebook.” This means that since calls are technically defined as an experience and sometimes a destination within the ad, a link click could be utilized as an estimation of phone calls on an ad. Moe called our Facebook rep to confirm his theory, and it was proven correct after he discussed it with his superiors. Surprisingly, according to the Facebook reps, no one else had thought of this as long as they had worked there as most agencies encourage their clients to buy vanity numbers or use third-party software after marking them up. The Velocity team believes in providing the highest ROI for our clients and therefore we thought we would share this and help small businesses and anyone else who could benefit from this. Do you have any new discoveries in digital marketing? Share them in the comments below!