The Challenge
Comfort Keepers is a leading provider of in-home care for seniors, with over 650 franchisee locations. Each franchisee services customers in their unique territory and hires caregivers who visit customers’ homes to assist them. To be successful, franchisees rely on the Comfort Keepers marketing team to deliver not just a steady stream of new sales opportunities, but also qualified job applicants.
We had a huge gap in visibility for calls we were driving to franchisees through our national advertising.
Bryan Huber, Worldwide Vice President, Digital Marketing at Comfort Keepers
Having to drive leads for two disparate audiences to over 650 franchise territories is a big challenge, so Comfort Keepers partners with data transformation company Search Discovery to help them drive those conversions from Google Ads. That challenge is compounded, however, by the fact that most leads engage with Comfort Keepers’ Google Ads campaigns by calling: 70% of sales leads and 50% of job applicant inquiries come in over the phone.
“We had a huge gap in visibility for calls we were driving to franchisees through our national advertising,” said Bryan Huber, Worldwide Vice President, Digital Marketing at Comfort Keepers. “Imagine you do a search for ‘home care’ and you click on a PPC ad and you end up at ComfortKeepers.com. You like what you see, and you find a location and dial that local number. We had no insight into where a call even took place, much less analytics on the intent of the caller and what channels, keywords, and webpages drove it. So we turned to Invoca.”
The Resolution
Keyword- and session-level call tracking
Comfort Keepers began using Invoca’s call tracking solution to make those phone calls as measurable as clicks, whether the calls came from their website or a search ad extension. For every call, Invoca captured who the caller was and their phone number; the franchisee they called; the marketing channel, ad, search keyword, website interaction that drove the call; and more.
Comfort Keepers and Search Discovery pass that call data from Invoca into Google Analytics and Search Ads 360 to enable them to optimise Google Ads bid strategies to drive more calls at a lower cost. It was a big success, enabling Comfort Keepers and Search Discovery to:
- Increase annual call volume from Google Ads by 59%
- Reduce overall cost per call by 50%
Thanks to Invoca’s AI and call tracking data, we are driving more sales opportunities and caregivers to our franchisee network. It’s been transformative to our business.
Bryan Huber, Worldwide Vice President, Digital Marketing at Comfort Keepers
AI-driven conversation intelligence
Getting an accurate understanding of how Google Ads drives calls was an important first step. But to truly move the needle, Comfort Keepers and Search Discovery needed analytics from the actual phone conversations to understand the intent, experience, and outcome of each call.
“One of the biggest challenges with running paid search campaigns for a franchise network is that it is difficult to know what happens to the calls we send to franchisees,” said Huber. “And without understanding the full context and experience of each call, we don’t know if we are driving the right kinds of calls from Google Ads, if the franchisees are answering and converting them, or if we are wasting budget driving bad calls.”
So Comfort Keepers began using Invoca’s AI to get marketing insights from the national advertising through phone conversations at scale without manually listening to calls. When a call is made, Invoca records and transcribes the call, then applies their custom AI algorithm to analyse the conversation to determine:
- Call Experience: If the caller abandoned the call or was sent to voicemail
- Caller Disposition: If the caller was a sales lead, job applicant, current customer, or other type of call
- Operational Performance: If the franchisee converted the call to a sales opportunity or job candidate and if a customer experience issue occurred during the call
- Call Value: A lead score based on the intent, interest, and outcome of the call
Invoca then connects those AI-driven insights from each conversation to the caller and marketing source that drove the call. Comfort Keepers and Search Discovery can now understand what calls from Google Ads keywords, ad groups, and campaigns were valid sales or job leads and if they converted.
Invoca then activates those KPIs from calls (disposition, lead score, conversion outcome) in Comfort Keepers’ Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts, enabling them to:
- Prove Marketing’s Value to Franchisees: The Comfort Keepers marketing team now has accurate, holistic metrics of the sales opportunities and job applicants they deliver to each franchisee — both online and over the phone — to prove the true impact they are having on their business.
- Optimise Google Ads Bid Strategies: With data on not just call volume — but caller disposition, quality, and outcomes — in Google Ads, Search Discovery can make smarter bid optimisations to drive more calls that convert to sales opportunities and job candidates at a lower CPL.
- Segment Callers into the Right Audiences: Invoca’s AI automatically segments each caller into the best audience in Google Ads (sales lead, job lead, sales conversion, job conversion, etc.) based on the content of their conversation. It enables Search Discovery to optimise and tailor bids and messaging for each audience to more effectively convert good leads, find new lookalikes resembling their best callers, and eliminate wasted ad spend on irrelevant audiences.
- Improve Results from Google Ads Smart Bidding: By having callers in the right audiences and accurate data on the lead quality and outcome of each call in their Google Ads account, Comfort Keepers provides Google’s smart bidding algorithm with the data it needs to drive better results by only optimising for what drives the right types of calls.
The Results
- 20% increase sales inquiries from paid search
- 50% increase in phone sales conversions from paid search
- 59% increase in annual call volume from Google Ads
- 50% lower overall cost-per-call
- 14% increase in conversion rates from job applicant calls
Comfort Keepers’ main goals for Google Ads are to find people who buy their services and people qualified to work for franchisees. It’s very important for us to be able to only use calls that fit those categories in our decision making, and that’s what Invoca’s AI provides. We now have the data to optimise bid strategies towards driving the most relevant calls.
Bryan Huber, Worldwide Vice President, Digital Marketing at Comfort Keepers
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