Item: Marchex
Rating: 8
Author: John Kobel

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Marchex was used to track phone calls from our Paid Search in Google, Bing, and Facebook. Code was set up on client websites to track the source of phone call leads to better optimize the clients' budgets to maximize ROI on their paid search efforts.

Pros and Cons

Ease of set up
Always available by phone
Ease of reporting

Although customer support is only a phone call away, trouble shooting was not their strongest area. There was usually only one person who could help with technical support and getting past the gate keepers to talk to that person was not easy.
Salesmen were difficult to get in touch with. You think it would be easy to negotiate a contract to add more services but this proved to be a difficult task as well.
Online reporting could use improvement. If you wanted to sift through data you had to download a spreadsheet to manipulate the data. Very little beyond simple reporting could be accomplished on their platform.

Return on Investment

As an agency there was no ROI for us. As for our clients, we were able to double and triple ROI for client's overall business objectives
The ability to track phone call leads back to a specific ad group or keyword in Google Ads or Microsoft Ads helped us quickly find wasted ad spend and star keywords that consistently generated conversions.
The only issue we had with conversion tracking is Marchex's difficulty in pulling conversion data into Google Analytics

Alternatives Considered

Marchex was much better than Car Wars in reporting and tracking and implementation. The costs were about the same.

Call Rail has the specific advantage over Marchex with its ability to easily integrate data with Google Analytics.