When Bret Forster joined the Sagora Senior Living marketing team last summer, one of his first priorities was, well, exactly what you’d expect from a new digital marketing manager: He wanted to know which campaigns and keywords were driving conversions, and which ones weren’t.
Sagora operates more than 30 retirement communities in Alabama, California, Florida, Oklahoma, and their home state of Texas. Their communities span the full spectrum of retirement living, accommodating both independent and assisted living residents as well as seniors in need of memory care.
As Forster sought to better understand the company’s marketing performance, he started with the lead capture endpoints: How were prospective residents converting? Were they primarily filling out forms on Sagora’s website? Were they dropping by for in-person tours? Or were they calling the communities directly?
Having used CallRail’s call tracking software in previous roles, Forster introduced it to his colleagues, thinking it would be useful for determining which marketing campaigns and activities were responsible for the company’s high volume of inbound calls.
“CallRail has been eye-opening for us since Bret brought it in,” Sagora Director of Marketing James Brown said. “We’ve seen a lot of value out of it, not only for understanding our cost per lead, but also being able to more critically discern what our search terms are, what search terms are really generating better results for us.”
Step one: Call tracking. Step two: Multi-touch Cost Per Lead, all in one place
Sagora started using CallRail in August 2018 — the same month we rolled out our first-to-market multi-touch Cost Per Lead calculator. It’s a solution designed to make life easier for digital marketers, reducing the time spent collecting conversion and cost data from multiple sources before it all gets synthesized into a single metric or KPI.
Soon after getting the company’s CallRail account set up, Bret and James gave our multi-touch CPL report a try, and they liked what they saw.
“It’s been nice to just look in one place and see based on the campaign, ad group, and actual keyword phrase which ads are driving the raw leads in the form of calls,” Bret Forster, digital marketing manager at Sagora, said.
And of course, back in December, we announced some big-time enhancements to our multi-touch CPL report, which now pulls in ad spend data from Facebook and Bing, in addition to Google, while recording both form and text conversions to more holistically pricetag the total spend on a lead.
Bret and James, along with other digital marketers using our multi-touch CPL report, are able to view their marketing performance in a variety of multi-touch attribution models, all with an eye toward their main conversion points: Phone calls and form fills.
This reporting solution finally put Sagora’s CPL woes to rest, which was a consistent headache for their team: “We primarily used the main (CallRail) dashboard for reporting — the call reports themselves. And then we fed them into Excel spreadsheets and manipulated the data within that to get a view that would give us [that metric],” Brown explained.
3 tips for getting started with CallRail’s multi-touch CPL report, from the pros at Sagora
1) Mark qualified leads in your call reporting
This is the first (but also most critical) step. Start off by diving into your analytics to individually mark qualified leads — this will allow you to enjoy the full range of reporting options.
2) Review the Multi-Touch CPL report, and filter the results according to ‘qualified leads’
Now, you can see what the cost is for each qualified lead you’re bringing in. And even better, you can go granular with your reporting and break down your analytics according to the ‘Ad Groups’ and channels that are best at driving leads.
3) Then, apply the ‘raw leads’ filter to the main report
By leveraging this final CPL reporting filter, you’ll have a high-level view of exactly where your calls and form leads are coming from.
