Call Tracking: What Is It and Why Does It Matter To Your Business?

If you have not implemented call tracking software to help you keep up with your sales and marketing, you should do so immediately. Research shows that calls to U.S businesses from social, search, display, and other paid ads have grown by more than 110% since 2014.  This represents approximately 162 billion calls every year.

With so many consumers dialing phone numbers to reach businesses, call tracking remains the thin line separating businesses that know where they are and those that conduct their marketing blindly. Failure to track, attribute, and report your calls can affect your marketing ROI immensely.

The sad truth is that if you haven’t realized the value that calls bring to your marketing campaigns, it is because you are not tracking them. Read on to find out why call tracking is essential to your business.

What Is Call Tracking?

Before we discuss the value of call tracking, it is important to define what we are talking about.  In simple terms, call tracking refers to the process of tracking marketing activities that drive calls to your business.

This is usually done by pairing a phone tracking number with the specific source you wish to track such as Google Ads, Newsletters, Facebook Ads, etc. Tracking numbers forward calls to your business helping you know the source of the phone call.

call tracking

Call tracking can either be static or dynamic.  When you track calls from a marketing channel where the phone number is displayed statically, then you are using static call tracking.

For instance, if you want to track inbound calls from a Facebook post, you will assign the tracking number to the specific Facebook post, and every time the phone number displayed on the post is dialed, you will receive accurate information about the source. In this case, the tracking number displayed on the Facebook post is static.

Dynamic call tracking is based on Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) technology. This tracking technique works by displaying unique phone numbers on your business website based on a set of predefined rules and the sources you wish to track.

By adding a DNI script on your business website, the tracking software swaps the number on your site and reports the source of every inbound call. In simple words, someone who clicked on your Google Ad will view a different phone number from someone who engaged with your site organically. However, the customer’s experience is seamless.

How Does Call Tracking Benefit Your Business?

Now that we understand what call tracking is, let us discuss why it is more valuable than other lead tracking techniques.

Below are some of the top benefits your business will enjoy with call tracking:

1. Determine your true ROI

With call tracking, you know exactly which of your marketing channels are sending over qualified leads and improving your conversion rates. It makes marketing ROI quite visible and measurable. The data you obtain can help you make smart decisions on where to invest more.

Consider this scenario. You are a small startup with a monthly marketing budget of $3000. Each month, you split the $3000 equally between six marketing avenues: Pay-per-click, pay per call, SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, and print advertisements.

Your combined marketing effort brings you 100 phone leads which turn into sales. That is great. Now, the following month, you want to increase your marketing budget since you already see success with your current marketing efforts, but you can only afford to add an extra $300.

The big question is, which marketing channel is going to get the extra $300? An average marketer will split it evenly across all marketing channels, but that is not the right way to do it.

A good marketer will isolate the marketing channel with the best ROI and pump the extra $300 into it. But how will you know which channel has the highest ROI if you can’t tell how many phone calls came from each channel?

2. Determine which keywords are driving calls

Call tracking also enhances the power of your paid online campaigns by providing you with insights into the specific keywords that drive calls to your business. With visitor level tracking, most call tracking software will assign a unique phone number from your number pool to every visitor allowing you to know who is calling you and how they found your business.

Once the visitor is done with browsing your website, their phone number is immediately freed up for another visitor to use it. This unique feature allows you to effectively track your marketing campaigns and establish which keywords people are using to discover your business.

Whenever a visitor decides to call your business, their data is automatically fed into Google Analytics and Google Ads, allowing you to track the phone calls as conversions as well. If you combine this with the other data you collect from Google Analytics, you will have a full understanding of the keywords you need to focus on more.

3. Helps you to analyze and score calls for quality

Call scoring is important to marketers.  In most cases, clients will want a better understanding of the call quality and will always challenge marketers on reported calls. Therefore, having call scoring data is critical during such conversations.

A few years ago, call scoring was reserved for big corporations and marketers with relatively large budgets and big-ticket items.

However, recent advancements in machine learning and voice recognition have changed everything. Today, most call tracking companies have invested in automated call scoring software that is highly effective.

As a marketer, you need to arm yourself with the call scoring data to back up the results of reporting on specific campaign performance when presenting the information to your clients.

Take Your Business to The Next Level with Pay Per Call Campaigns!

The sad reality is that you cannot start tracking calls if you aren’t receiving them. Fortunately, we are here to help you generate a consistent flow of highly qualified inbound calls.

We are a pay per call company specializing in legal, insurance, healthcare, finance, and many more markets.

We have been in the pay per call space for over a decade and know what it takes to produce quality calls. Contact us today and let us help you take your business to the next level.