Indiana-based Central Restaurant Products offers hundreds of thousands of restaurant-related product solutions including cooking equipment, refrigeration, food prep, furniture, shelving, carts, concessions, dishwashing and dining room goods. Originally founded as a catalog company, the company launched a website in 2001 to bring its products to a larger, online audience.
Challenge
Central Restaurant relies on website traffic for product orders and revenue. To drive traffic, the company utilizes organic and paid search from Google, Bing and Criteo. To better understand revenue from these channels, Central Restaurant needs to be able to match sales to its advertising programs.
While Google Analytics is the main source of information for understanding digital marketing programs at Central Restaurant, it doesn’t give a complete picture of which campaigns resulted in sales. “It gives a high-level dashboard for how many calls we’ve got, but it doesn’t tell you your revenue. That’s really the big thing,” explains Nathan Smith, Marketing Database Analyst at Central Restaurant Products.
Initially the paid search team wanted to understand the performance of its programs so it could optimize budget. The organic team followed suit and requested performance data for SEO campaign optimization.
“Our call center handles roughly 70 percent of our sales volume. Knowing that our marketing efforts are driving customers to call into our reps and being able to link that revenue back to show that our marketing is working is key to our revenue-generation process.”
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Nathan Smith, Marketing Database Analyst,
Central Restaurant Products
Solution
For a fuller picture of its digital advertising program, Central Restaurant implemented Marchex Marketing Edge, a call tracking and conversation analytics solution that links calls and text messages to the media that drove them. One tactic available for conversation tracking is to use dynamic number insertion (DNI). DNI swaps in a call tracking number for the company phone number in order to link a conversation to a specific user session, which in turn can be linked to a specific ad campaign and/or keyword.
Explains Smith, “We’ve been using DNI for paid search. The big thing that we use that for is to attribute revenue to the Google and the Microsoft Click IDs. Once we get the revenue tied into those Click IDs, then we import it back into the ad platforms for better bidding. So, we’re layering offline on top of the online that we already have in there.”
Once the organic team saw the value of linking revenue to actions, they wanted to link conversation data as well. “The organic team was interested in gaining visibility into what phone calls they are actually driving because we were only looking at Google Analytics online conversions. They were missing that offline piece. Being able to match back calls to organic search gives the team better visibility into their efforts because they spend a lot of time optimizing SEO,” said Smith.
Since Central Restaurant also uses Criteo, they decided to implement call tracking there too. “While it doesn’t have the Click ID, it’s a third-party platform we operate outside of Bing and Google, and we wanted to get an idea of how impactful it is related to actions offline,” said Smith.
To link the offline call data to the ad, Smith matches call data with data in his CRM system. If he can match it to a customer record, and the customer received a quote or placed an order, that data is pushed back into Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising so Central Restaurant can understand the real impact of its campaign and make more informed decisions.
Call data can also be used for troubleshooting when Google Analytics data raises questions. “One of the things we do when we see a campaign that’s driving a lot of calls but not a lot of revenue, we go into the platform and pull those calls out and listen to them. We get user sentiment of the call so we can learn if these are valuable calls that we’re driving where we’re just not making the connections, or if these are people calling to follow up on invoices or shipping and we’re not driving good traffic,” explains Smith.
In addition to an easy-to-use platform, Central Restaurant has been pleased with the support it has received from Marchex. “We really haven’t had any hiccups, and if something has come up, the team has been very responsive and things have been rectified pretty quickly, so we’ve been happy,” said Smith.
“As a company that employs 50 inside sales reps, being able to generate phone calls for them through our own advertising and being able to match those dollars up has been a huge piece of our business.”
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Nathan Smith, Marketing Database Analyst,
Central Restaurant Products
Results
Marchex Marketing Edge helps Central Restaurant evaluate its online marketing efforts by providing a more complete picture of effectiveness of campaigns that drive offline actions such as phone calls. With this data, Central Restaurant can optimize its marketing budget, digital advertising and SEO campaigns and make better, data‑driven decisions to optimize performance.
“Getting the revenue piece in the ad platforms is huge because you can see that offline impact where your online ROAS (return on ad spend) might be let’s say a four, but, in reality, it’s a five or a six when you take in the offline. So that allows us to be more aggressive or be more conservative and cut stuff that’s not working,” explains Smith. Central Restaurant relies on digital marketing to bring in leads, and a high proportion of leads come in as phone calls. Optimization of offline actions plays a key role in the company’s success.