Marchex expands offices to Sydney to extend mobile analytics reach

Australia is fast approaching the tipping point where mobile is acknowledged as the primary device to reach and engage consumers on, Marchex’s new country manager claims.

The mobile advertising analytics company opened an office in Sydney this month to expand its technology facilities support growing demand for the company’s Marchex Call Analytics platform.

Overseeing the new A/NZ office is digital marketing veteran, Daniel Benton. He has more than 12 years of enterprise-class digital marketing experience leading business development, search and client services teams at some of Australia’s leading independent digital agencies in Australia, including Salmat Digital, The Found Agency and Returnity.

Benton said Marchex’s regional expansion in Australia and New Zealand is in recognition that Australians have a significant and enduring love affair with mobile devices.

“This love affair is why mobile traffic volumes for search, social, display, email and video continue to see double digit growth both quarter on quarter and year on year in Australia," he claimed. “I think we’re fast approaching the tipping point where mobile is acknowledged as being the primary device to reach and engage Australian users on.”

Marchex’s Call Analytics platform aims to give enterprise marketers full visibility into mobile’s influence on offline transactions. Marchex Call Analytics brings channel-specific solutions such as Marchex Call Analytics for Search which provides real-time attribution for phone calls from mobile search. In addition, phone calls are analysed by Marchex Call DNA, to visually map, classify and score every phone call automatically.

This year, the vendor added customers in the automotive, home services, publishing and retail industries.

Kristy Fenton, chief product officer at digital marketing and advertising company, Spotzer, said the business recently integrated with Marchex to help marketers increasingly focused on the mobile consumer’s path to purchase.

“Our integration with Marchex provides visibility into the growing volume of click-to-call activity from mobile consumers,” she said.

According to Benton, Marchex Call Analytics solves one of the most pressing issues facing marketers today - how to accurately attribute and optimise their growing mobile marketing investment.

“The insights and rich call analytics provided from Marchex can help to both drive media efficiency and performance uplifts along with driving customer experience improvements,” he claimed. “I believe in a lot of verticals and the natural primary conversion outcome from mobile is to deliver an inbound call. I also think inbound calls are sometimes undervalued as a conversion event.”

Benton suggested organisations should ideally be using technology to track and attribute calls from their media investments.

“They should then be ingesting this data back into their respective marketing platforms to iteratively optimise and improve their campaigns,” he said. “Additionally, I think brands should be leveraging technology to actively measure and manage the customer experience of inbound callers at scale to try and remove friction in the path to purchase.

“Improving the efficiency of both the media side of the equation and the customer experience side can deliver significant financial benefits to organisations. Essentially, these are the types of benefits we’re looking to help our clients realise in the Australian market.”

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia, or check us out on Google+: google.com/+CmoAu