Call tracking is the most accurate and cost-efficient way to gauge the ROI of your advertising strategies, and it is taking the industry by storm. Here are 5 great reasons why you should look into using call tracking as part of your not only your internet marketing plan, but also with your billboards, radio ads, direct mailings, etc.

1. Advertising Analytics

Each campaign medium is assigned a unique phone number, which allows a specialized computer program to track the origin of each call that comes over your main switchboard. On a daily basis, you will be able to analyze a variety of data that will let you know which of your advertising campaigns is generating the most response. You can then adjust your approach accordingly, saving you money!

2. Quality Control

Each call is recorded and can be accessed by management for quality control purposes. You want to know that your employees are providing the very best in customer service. Most companies cannot afford to record all incoming calls, but call tracking includes recording as a standard part of its service menu. Regular monitoring of these recorded calls helps management keep a handle on all of the company’s direct communications with the public.

3. Training Tool

These recorded calls can easily be used as a training tool both for new employees and for long-term workers. If one employee did a stellar job with customer service, that call can be circulated as an example for all to follow. Similarly, if a call was not handled properly, that recording can be used as an example of what NOT to do.

4. No New Equipment

One of the reasons businesses may hesitate to try a new system is that they fear that it will require installation of new hardware and software as well as retraining of existing employees. When you use tracking as part of your internet marketing plan, there is absolutely no software to install and each separate phone number is routed directly to your switchboard where your employees handle calls as they always have: call tracking is completely non-intrusive.

5. Increased Profits

Case studies have shown that when using this technique, companies are reporting:

• A huge increase in qualified leads from their sales departments
• Customer service is greatly improved
• Much less money wasted on ineffective marketing campaigns

All this adds up to a healthier bottom line, more brand recognition, and happier customers: you should look into call tracking and see what it can do for you!

What Is Call Tracking?

• Wiworks will assign a unique phone number to each piece of advertising that you put in the marketplace.
• That phone number is separate from your regular business one yet will still be routed to your switchboard.
• The difference with this number is that it is connected to a web interface that tracks the name and address of the person who called, the time, and which ad the potential customer is responding to.
• The call is even recorded automatically for future reference, if needed.

Here are 3 Great Reasons To Get Cracking With Call Tracking

1. It Saves You Money

With call tracking, you will instantly know if the content of your advertising is targeting the right demographic for your products. The data collected by call tracking will help you determine if your message is getting through to the right people or if you need to tweak your content a bit: there is no use in wasting money on advertising that is not effective! Based on call tracking’s findings, you may also wish to altogether eliminate a method of advertising that is simply not giving you the ROI you need. For around $25, you will valuable information that is priceless.

2. It Doesn’t Require Any Special Equipment or Training

How many times have you tried to implement positive changes in your office workflow system only to meet with employee resistance or the need to spend tons of extra money on training? Call tracking provided by Wiworks experts is a stand-alone system that requires absolutely no special equipment or complicated and costly employee training. In fact, with call tracking your employees will answer the same phones as usual and never even notice it’s in use! Call tracking is a way to keep track of your advertising dollars that will absolutely never interfere with the daily ins and outs of your business.

3. There Are No Long Term Commitments

One of the best features of call tracking is that there are no contracts to sign and there are never any hidden fees or add-on costs later. If for any reason you don’t like it, you are not stuck with a long-term contract for a product that you don’t want. Similarly, if your advertising campaign is a relatively short one, you won’t have to pay for call tracking beyond the time limits of your big push. When the ad expires so does call tracking, and the temporary contact number associated with it will be automatically discontinued.

Consumers are starting to spend again and no business or service can afford to cut back on brand recognition strategies and marketing. The trick is to spend those advertising dollars more wisely by determining if they are really accomplishing what they set out to do.

Call tracking is one of the most efficient, cost-effective ways to make sure your advertising is really working for you. So get cracking with call tracking today!

The purpose of any advertising campaign is to create new customers and opportunity. Unfortunately, there are so many ways to advertise that it’s impossible to try them all. Many advertising and marketing companies claim to offer the “ABSOLUTE BEST” or “MOST COST EFFECTIVE SOUTION”, yet fail to truly deliver results.

They really hate it when our clients pull up the exact number of calls that come in from a specific ad, the date and time they called, the prospect’s name and address, and where the call originated from. Traditional ad agencies are finally realizing that they can’t simply ‘wow’ a client with fancy designs, empty promises and poor assessments on the effectiveness of each ad. Call tracking allows customers to immediately track which ads work and which ads don’t by measuring cold hard facts. Testing and tracking ads is here to stay.

Our unique call tracking system requires No Software, No special equipment, No changes to current systems, No new phone numbers to buy, No contracts, No installation fees, No training, and No hassles. And it’s affordable too!

Averaging only $25.00/month to confirm success or failure on ads that can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, why would you not invest in tracking insurance?

With big clients, big sales and the future of your company at stake, don’t throw your money into ads that aren’t producing high ROI. Tracking and measuring the results of each of your campaign ads can be the most profitable decision you ever make for your business.

**Local and Toll free numbers available for any campaign and can be delivered to you the very same day.

THEN WHY NOT INSURE YOUR ADVERTISING?! Let’s face it, when you advertise, it’s a crap shoot on whether it will bring in any new clients. What happens if it doesn’t work right away? What if there was a way, for around $25.00, you could verify the actual return on all your advertisements? Yellow pages, news papers, billboards, radio, television, coupons, direct mail, website, flyers, brochures, etc…? You name it and it can be tracked. Call tracking can provide you with real-time stats on every call answered, dropped or missed, as well as tell you which ad or promotion the call originated from.

You are spending thousands of dollars on the ad; its reckless not to spend an additional $25.00 to measure whether that ad is working for you or not. Instead of waiting months, you can immediately see if your ad is working or not with Call Tracking. Make any necessary adjustments; change the copy, alter the presentation, or make any other changes that feel are necessary to make the ad campaign work for you, not against you.

CALL TRACKING FROM UTAH WEB SERVICES is the answer. We implement a unique phone number on each piece of advertising, connect the number to a web interface and then redirect that unique number to your switchboard. No software, no special equipment, no extra phone lines, no contracts, no hidden fees, and no training. Your employees simply answer the phone as they typically do, but now with Advertising Insurance, you know exactly where the call comes from, the prospect’s name, their telephone number, their address, and which advertising piece the call originated from. The conversation between your employees and prospects is recorded for quality control purposes. Detailed information is captured for you to use now or later. Now you can gauge if your advertising paid for itself or has failed you.

IMAGINE TOTAL CONTROL OF YOUR ADVERTISING ROI – You no longer have to question whether your advertisements work or not, now you can be sure. Negotiate better deals with hard stats to validate success or failure, drop the unsuccessful advertising and spend more on the advertisements where ROI is verified. Come up with an accurate cost per sale figure and manage your bottom line more effectively.

Google has spent millions of dollars getting to know who we are, what we like, what we shop for, what we search for, the sites we frequent, the blogs we gather information from, the news sites we stay up-to-date with, the celebrities we follow, our style, our personal health and pretty much anything else they can find out about us that we openly share and allow over the web without even knowing it.

As unnerving as this reality is, we tend to just continue doing what we’re doing and enjoying an online experience without any regard of what is happening behind the scenes. It is becoming more and more acceptable to allow Google to continue gathering whatever information they can on me, my family, my neighbors and my friends. After all, I can’t see them watching, I don’t get a notice that someone is following me around while I am surfing the web, I can’t see anyone else’s reflection in my flat panel monitor. Basically, out of site and certainly out of mind…so go ahead and gather whatever information you need.

Google continues to gather information so they can deliver exactly what I want, or what they think I want. If I am a nature lover and search for ‘dolphins’, my search history would lead Google to provide me with nature sites, fish sites and related environmental sites. However, if I am a football nut and search for dolphins, Google will probably provide me with football sites, the Miami Dolphins site and any top sports sites that match my query. This amazing process of a search engine knowing more about me than I would like will continue as their processes become more refined and transparent.

Call Tracking - Only a fool doesn’t track their ads!

Thomas Tusser once said, “A fool and his money are soon parted”. This has never been so apparent than in the advertising and marketing arena. There are hundreds of advertising choices from TV, Radio, Print, Online, Viral, Social, Coupons, Billboards and all of the other basics. Any business needs a steady stream of new customers to survive and continue staying in business.

Then why in the world would any smart businessman plow money into an advertising campaign that he cannot control or at least evaluate the return, if any? Just because the sales rep told you that the ad was a hit or provides you with some manufactured stats on the penetration of their advertising piece, doesn’t make the ad successful. Bottom line: if the ad made you money it was a success, and if you have no idea whether it did or didn’t make you any money, then it was a failure.

Welcome to UNIQUE CALL TRACKING. Simple and straightforward. Here’s how the program works:

1. Utah Web Services provides you with a unique phone number to put on your yellow page ad, magazine ad, direct mail coupon, radio, website or whatever piece of advertising you want to verify your return.
2. A potential client calls that unique number; the call is routed through a web server and then connects to your current phone number. It will come in just like any other call.
3. We track the caller, show you their address and name, time stamp the call, record the conversation for future use or management and show you exactly which advertisement the prospect called from.
4. No contracts. No software. No hassle. No change in business. No worries.
5. Once the ad expires, the number is cancelled and turned back into UWS.

Yes, it’s really that simple!!!

If you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on an ad, who in their right mind would not spend an additional $20 to confirm whether the ad dollars were spent wisely or not? It defies logic as to why anyone would not place a unique tracking number on every marketing piece, every yellow page ad, every marketing brochure, every magazine ad, newspaper ad or virtually any other advertising piece that leaves the front door of their business.

With so much to gain and virtually nothing to lose, why aren’t you tracking?

ARE YOU TRACKING? TIME TO FIND REAL CLIENTS AND REAL PROFITS

If you are not tracking all of your advertising, then you’re wasting money! Do your local charity a favor and just write them a check instead of wasting your money. At least this way you’ll know that your money is actually doing some good.

IF WE CAN’T SAVE YOU MONEY - YOUR CALL TRACKING IS FREE!!!!

1. Target your primary audience. A good advertising campaign should be catered to your primary niche market. Oftentimes, businesses make the mistake of creating generic ads that do not grab attention or speak to their primary customer.
2. Highlight your advantages. A key in advertising is to accentuate the advantages your company has over your competitors. This gives you a strong competitive edge and allows your customers to see why your products, goods or services are better than the next guy’
3. Establish an identity. Almost everyone recognizes the symbolic golden arches that represent McDonald’s. There are plenty of products in the world that are easily recognized by symbols, logos or packaging. Image is very important when it comes to effective advertising and promoting your company. Smart advertisers know that building a consistent image equals higher sales. Read Three Brand Identity Myths That Will Bring Your Business Down.
4. Spend money to earn money. There are billions of ways to save money, but typically advertising is not the place where you should cut corners. Cutting corners will negatively affect sales, and in turn, negatively affect your bottom line. Successful advertising may cost more money than you had expected to spend, but the results are well worth it. Check out information on Call Tracking to learn valuable information on tracking results on all your advertising campaigns. Call tracking is an easy, inexpensive way to figure out which ad campaigns are bringing in the most leads and which ones aren’t.
5. Advertise in the right places. Remember, your favorite radio stations, magazines, or TV programs may not be the same as your audience. Research what your audience typically listens to, reads, and watches in order to determine which advertising media will best reach your targeted market.
6. Don’t allow your budget to lead your advertising campaign. If you budget $2,000 per month for advertising, you may have made it easy from a bookkeeping perspective, but have you accounted for seasonal highs and lows? Most businesses fail to take into account seasonal highs and lows, and their advertising efforts suffer because of it. If you’re spending too much money during hard, economic times, then you may be throwing your money away.
7. Branch out. Many business owners choose one media to advertise, based on the price and potential ROI, and then simply stop. Much like investing, you never want to put all your eggs in one basket. It’s a better idea to spread your advertising dollars around.
8. Don’t try to impress everyone. Realistically, no one product or service will appeal to everyone. A lot of business owners, including CEO’s, try to come up with too many ways to reach every single market. Typically, this is not a good idea and does not work. It usually spells disaster for small companies who cannot afford to spread themselves too thin. Try to find your niche market and be everything you can to that audience.
9. Test your ads. Test your ads on other people. Do they fully understand the message you’re trying to convey? If not, it may be a good idea to restructure your ad.
10. Monitor every single one of your ads. If you don’t have a way to ensure that your advertisements are bringing in new leads and creating new opportunity, then what good are they? You could potentially be throwing away thousands of dollars each year on ad campaigns that aren’t bringing in one single sale. Many businesses do not track their ads, let alone even know how to track them.

Call Tracking is an easy, affordable solution to track all of your campaign advertisements to determine if they are successful or if they need to be eliminated altogether. Find out if you’re saving your company money or wasting it all on ad campaigns that simply don’t work.

The Canonical URL Tag is useful for a variety of scenarios:

•    If your category url’s creates multiple versions of the same page.
For example: www.colors.com/yellow-color?color=yellow
•    If a session ID creates duplicate content.
For example: www.colors.com/yellow-color?SESSID=012
•    If your print-only url’s create several versions of the same page.
For example: www.colors.com/print/yellow-color

SEO professionals can help you determine whether you need this tag and where to apply it. Search engines will now be able to identify multiple url’s with duplicate content and decide what to include and exclude while indexing. When asked if this canonical tag was a hint or directive, Google said “It’s a hint we honor strongly. We’ll take your presence into account, in conjuncture with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.”

Google, Yahoo and MSN will also take into account slight differences if the content is not an exact duplication, for example: slight differences in the sort order of products. They also specified that even a redirect url can be tagged with the canonical tag. Also, they stressed that the canonical tag cannot point to an entirely different domain, that it must be on the same domain or subdomains. This breakthrough canonical tag is an exciting new tool in the web world because it helps deal with problems associated with duplicate content, and allows search engines to index sites more thoroughly.

1. Your headline says it all – If your audience is not awestruck by your headline, then most likely they will not read anything else you have to say. Use descriptive words and phrases to make your headline compelling and creative.
2. Speak directly to your audience – Customers like to feel as if your writing is speaking directly to them. Use words like “you” and “your” as often as you can. Try to avoid this kind of wording: “One could assume that if one did the work necessary…” This not only sounds incredibly superior, but it disassociates the customer from your copy.
3. Don’t assume that your audience knows what you’re talking about - Always make it crystal clear about what you’re selling and all the benefits associated with your product or service. Make all action steps extremely obvious to get your customers to do what you want them to do.
4. Don’t use superfluous, incommodious words - Simply put: try not to use too many difficult words throughout your copy that most people are not familiar with. Again, this creates distance between your customer and your copy. If your customer has to look up every other word while reading your content, then your content does not flow well. Simplify it a little.
5. Write shorter paragraphs - Research has shown that longer paragraphs lose people’s interest. Keep things clear and concise. Short paragraphs, bullet points and lists can easily break up long paragraphs.
6. Create a good conclusion – Remember to effectively sum up your content in a well-written conclusion. Don’t end your content on a whim or it may leave your audience wondering what happened. Reiterate your main points about your product or service and explain to them again why it superior and why they should buy it.

Consumers have mixed results when judging the credibility of a website. What influences their opinions of why they trust one site opposed to another? And why will they buy the same product from one site, but not another one that is very similar? Ongoing consumer studies, such as the Stanford Web Credibility Research http://credibility.stanford.edu are striving to answer such questions. Although consumer opinions on web credibility will always differ, implementing these few simple tips and techniques into your sales copy may influence your reader to take the action you want them to.

A good brand:
-Motivates customers
-Creates customer loyalty
-Envokes an emotional response from your customers
-Makes your credible
-Is clear and concise

How do I accomplish this?

1. Having a perspective
Like a person companies have perspectives and views on certain issues. A fast food company isn’t all about healthy food, they are all about convenience, cost and taste. This vastly differs from a company like Wild Oats that charges premiums for its organic products. To them health is worth a little extra time and money and usually their customers agree.

2. Who are you, what do you do (why does it matter!?!)
Many companies fail to define themselves and fly by the seat of their pants. Creating focus for a company will not only help your brand but it will help your employees identify with the company and understand why their work is important.

More importantly than who you are and what you do is why does it matter. This is also known as a USP or a unique selling proposition. Why should customers buy from you and not your competitors, what is that’s different or special about you? If there is nothing that differentiates you from your competitors than you are unlikely to have huge success,

3. Presentation
So much of branding is about perception and appearance. If you are a high end services company you need expensive offices and professional sounding receptionists. If you are a skateboard company it’s more about style and acting casual, a big office doesn’t suit you in this case. Keep presentation in your mind at all times, this is how your customers will perceive you.

4. Be consistent
The thing that makes a brand work is that it’s consistent; it doesn’t change. When you go to McDonalds’ you know that you’re going to get the same Big Mac no matter where you are or when you buy. A coke is always going to taste like you expect and theres no surprises. Sure in reality there are failures and burgers aren’t always delicious. But this is why consistency is so important. You must make every attempt to deliver on your promises every single time. Failing to do what you claim will damage your brand very quickly. If your company focuses on service and you have an unhelpful customer service department say goodbye to your business.

5. Don’t be afraid to change
This one sounds a little contradictory but it is ok to change certain elements of your brand to keep up with the market. If your brand focuses on being old fashioned taking on new logos and fancy designs isn’t a great idea. But in many cases brands need to be developed over time to become the Nikes and Pepsi’s of the world so don’t restrict yourself if it means improvement.

http://www.slideshare.net/perfectpixels/creating-a-brand-persona
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?type=RESOURCES&itemId=1073790776

The difficult part seems to come when their site has been online for a while and they don’t get any hits or they get hits but don’t get any sales. Website Marketing is a fine art and there are dozens of things you can do. I will outline what I feel are 5 of the most important ways to make your website more marketable.

1) Content - It’s great to have a site that looks good with flash, animation, images etc. but good content is the keyto getting the right potential customers to your site and getting them to take action.

a. Search engines like content - When a search is submitted, the search engine scours the web to find sites with content most relevant to that search. So the more relevant content you have on your site the better but you want to keep in balance so that it is also interesting and valuable to your visitors.

b. Visitors like good content - When writing your content you want to make sure you are not only using terms that search engines will be looking for but you want to make it interesting to the reader. Ask yourself the following: Why would people come to this site? What am I offering that is unique and attractive to a potential buyer? Why would they choose my product or service over a competitor?

2) Clean code - Sites that are coded well are not only faster loading but more easily ready by search engines. Ideally make sure your site is coded using CSS (cascading style sheets) and W3C compliant (World Wide Web Consortium).

Once your site is up and running, here are some tools to run to make sure your code is clean:

Markup Validator Service

http://validator.w3.org/

NetMechanic

http://www.netmechanic.com/products/HTML_Toolbox_FreeSample.shtml

Dr. Watson

http://watson.addy.com/

3) URL Structure - Search engines can scan through your site urls and find keywords relevant to the search. Therefore if you are selling Nike shoes, it much better to name your page nike-shoes.html rather than something like page21.htm. This also applies to folder names so you should use something like shoes/nike-shoes.html rather than /store/page21.htm.

4) Link Submissions - We’ve all seen sites that promote submitting your site to 100,000 search engines. This may have worked back in the 90’s but it can actually cause more harm than good. What you want to do is submit your site only to directories with related content. When submitting to search engines, it is best to submit to only the really important ones such as:

a. Google

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

b. Yahoo (account needed)

https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.src=srch&.done=http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

c. Open Directory

http://www.dmoz.org/

5. Get Feedback - Marketing research can be a very simple but invaluable thing to have on your web site. Simply put up a feedback form to collect data from your visitors. Listen to what they have to say and adjust your site accordingly. When you receive glowing feedback on a product or service you have delivered, post that to a testimonials page. This will instill trust in others who are considering buying from you!

In summary, create a site that has clean code, fast loading and provides quality content that your visitors are looking for. Keep in mind the url structure to make the pages easy to find and only submit your site to the most quality directories and search engines. Quality is more important than quantity here. Finally get feedback from your visitors and heed that feedback to continually improve on your site.

GOOD LUCK IN YOUR ONLINE MARKETING EFFORTS!!