Phone-Based Analytics Ring True

Meineke Car Care Center is taking a minimalist approach to data analysis: All it uses to fuel its calculations are phone numbers.

The company uses between 2,500 and 3,000 telephone numbers to measure ad effectiveness among its 900-plus North American outlets. The company varies phone numbers in its pay-per-click search ads and print efforts, allowing it to compare new creative approaches and channels.

“At any given point in time, we probably have between 10 and 14 different types of tests in markets throughout the country,” says John Vitagliano, Meineke's vice president of marketing.

Having multiple phone numbers ring into a single location allows the company to test the effectiveness of phone directory ads against local online search channels. Inbound calls are routed to each location through a remote call forwarding system provided by Telmetrics, a call measurement firm.

“Up until now, in the search engine marketing world where we were paying for every click, it wasn't clear as to which center was getting a direct benefit” from Meineke local search campaigns, Vitagliano says.

Car Talk

The Telmetrics system captures the numbers of around 90% of inbound callers — the exceptions being primarily those that are blocked. Meineke, which records customer phone numbers on its invoices, evaluates which calls ultimately produce sales. In about 60% of the calls, Telmetrics is also able to provide customer names and addresses.

Since implementing the system in the first quarter of this year, Meineke has been evaluating its expenditures on online and print channels. (The system does not yet offer a way to track the influence of its national television campaigns.) As for other media, Meineke would be more likely to use personalized URLs in mail pieces than it would unique phone numbers, according to Vitagliano.

The use of dedicated numbers to evaluate online campaign effectiveness is relatively new, says Telmetrics president Bill Dinan. “Three years ago, 95% of our business was in print call tracking. Today, our revenue has grown and our call volume has grown — and 70% of what we track is from online efforts.”

There has been pushback on implementing new phone numbers by some local Meineke dealers, several of whom had been using the same number for decades. To assuage this, Meineke allowed dealers to keep using the phone numbers on business cards and invoices given to existing customers.

Vitagliano also toured the country, highlighting the system's ability to evaluate whether calls were going unanswered, or were coming in during hours when locations weren't open — but could be.

“The main thing we told dealers is that most of the advertising out there is disposable,” Vitagliano says. “Yellow pages go out of print and are renewed every year, and customers go to those sources to get local dealer numbers.”

Judging the conversion rate of calls to sales also provides insight into a location's service practices. “If 10% of center A's leads are translating into invoices, but only 5% of center B's leads are, we might look at telephone skills, not advertising,” Vitagliano says.

Finally, Meineke has used its analysis to fly in the face of commonly held wisdom — wisdom that would have resulted in less-beneficial media choices. Overall, markets in the Southern U.S. are less wired and use the Internet at a lower rate than those in the Northeast. But Meineke has seen higher lead volumes in the Southeast resulting from its search engine marketing efforts.

“This really speaks to the spirit of why we embarked on this,” Vitagliano says. “We really wanted to be data-based in how we are making marketing decisions.”