Phone call was, and still is one of the most important sales channels for many advertisers out there, especially those working on financial services, education and the automotive industry.
While many customers can start knowing about the thing they want to buy on the internet, they may end their purchase over the telephone. If this happens, Microsoft wants those businesses to be able to connect the phone sales, back to the ad campaign that may have assisted that purchase.
"Let’s say a customer sees your ad, clicks on it, but ends up calling you, leading to a sale that was taken offline," said Bing on its Tracking offline conversions page. "How can you track when your search ad leads to a conversion offline and outside of your website?"
Advertisers can import offline conversions, to better measure what happens after their ad was clicked.
This is how it works:
Microsoft's Bing Ads interoperates directly with Call-tracking systems (CTS), allowing users to import call conversion data through its Offline Conversion Import tool and related set of APIs. The system then uses the Microsoft Click ID (MSCLKID) that gets appended to every Bing Ads URL when an advertiser enables the Offline Conversion Import feature.
When click ID gets passed in the referring URL, it can be stored in a cookie or remain persistent in the URL. The click ID then gets passed into the advertiser’s CRM system when a user fills out a form on the website and remains associated with that user.
This way, if the user chooses to use a phone call, the conversion can connect back to the click ID.
What the advertiser needs to do, is to upload that offline conversion data back into Bing Ads.
Among the first call-tracking services participating into the program, was CallTrackingMetrics. The system can automatically send session and conversion data to Bing Ads campaigns.
Why businesses should care about offline conversion tracking, is because it enables better reporting insights, campaign optimizations, as well as platform enhancements based on the wider impact of businesses' search campaigns. It also provides better tracking, and of course, potentially better ROI because campaigns are optimized based on the full online and offline impacts.
Bing Ads first began supporting offline conversion imports back in September 2017, enabling advertisers to attribute offline conversion events captured in their CRM systems.
Microsoft is looking forward to incorporate other call-tracking providers to use its offline conversions capability, and connect their call conversion data back to Bing Ads.