The Fox Symes customer journey is long and complicated, so determining which leads drove sales (especially over the phone) was a constant challenge. To effectively optimise its marketing budgets, it connected Google Analytics with in-house systems and found mobile ads were driving phone sales.
Goals
Optimise marketing investment based on sales instead of leads
Properly attribute phone sales to different marketing investments
Calculate true return on ad spend, including online and phone sales
Approach
Integrated Google Analytics with in-house CRM and third-party call tracking
Imported total sales (from both phone and online leads) into Google Analytics
Optimised marketing investments based on total sales
Results
Found that 59% of sales driven by digital marketing came by phone
Mobile advertising drove phone sales at a 145% higher conversion rate
Fox Symes is Australia's largest provider of debt consolidation solutions for individuals and businesses. As such, it gets a lot of phone calls and web enquiries. Those enquiries often kick off a long, multi-channel customer journey from lead to sale, similar in length to customer journeys in industries like banking, insurance, and telecom.
As Australians often make phone enquiries after conducting online research, tracking customer journeys from leads to sales was proving difficult for Fox Symes. Without a clear idea of which leads turned into sales or what channel each sale was coming from, the impact of its marketing spend was hard to pin down.
Fox Symes worked to integrate Google Analytics, call tracking, and its lead management system to get a clear view of where sales were coming from, regardless of whether the origin point was over the phone or on the web. This full integration has revealed that mobile was driving far more sales than originally thought. Fox Symes used this information to optimise its marketing mix and place more emphasis on mobile.
Breaking data silos with Google Analytics
An easy (and common) mistake marketers make is optimising all marketing activities toward online enquiries and overlooking phone sales. However, a full 59% of sales took place by phone, so getting a better view of where those sales originated was critical.
Fox Symes integrated different data systems into a cohesive solution with Google Analytics serving as its central platform, providing an integrated view of the customer journey. Its lead management system supplied Google Analytics with its sales (phone or web) outcomes. And call tracking supplied Google Analytics with the company's calls data.
With numbers in hand, Fox Symes could now take a more informed look at its marketing mix and calculate return on advertising spend.
Once reporting was fully integrated, Fox Symes had a whole new read on the customer journey. With phone interactions taken into account, the company noted 145% more sales were influenced by digital touchpoints. It also saw a 50% higher lead-to-sale conversion rate from phone enquiries versus online enquiries.
With numbers in hand, Fox Symes could now take a more informed look at its marketing mix and calculate return on advertising spend. "A high percentage of our online leads were low quality, and we had no way to tell which kinds were bad and which kinds to optimise. On top of that, a high percentage of users landed on the site and then just called up afterwards, so we couldn't track them. Monitoring and measuring ads, leads, calls, and sales in one place was the only way to inform our marketing decisions," said Fox Symes Marketing Manager Victor Sun.
Optimising for mobile (where a majority of leads were coming from)
The big reveal from the integrated reporting was the importance of mobile. It turned out that a lot of Fox Symes' sales originated on mobile, a channel it had previously underinvested in. After looking at phone and web enquiries, mobile accounted for 52% of total sales and had a 50% higher lead-to-sale conversion rate compared to desktop.
By using Google Analytics to organise its sales data, Fox Symes can optimise bidding across devices and activate lead-to-sale remarketing strategies. Understanding the full value of mobile now allows Fox Symes to invest more heavily in this channel and reach potential customers right in the moment they’re looking for help.
