Call Tracking Best Practices and Tools

If you are launching or growing a business, online or offline, the most important measure of success is ultimately the sales and revenue that your business generates. The key to generating those sales is targeting and reaching an audience of your ideal customers. This means running marketing campaigns that get your business noticed and people taking action. With a number of marketing platforms at your disposal, you want to leverage the platforms that allow you to build a strategy that attracts the greatest number of leads for your business.

If you have run or are currently running any digital advertising campaigns, you probably use tools like Google Analytics or Google Ads to get insight into the performance of ads, your website, and any pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. But what if the leads you want to generate include phone calls? How would you track and measure those metrics? Chances are, you’d want to receive the same kind of detailed, actionable data you get from your other analytic tools, to determine if your ‘click to call’ campaigns are just as effective as your ‘click to website’ campaigns at generating leads.

Phone calls are just as important to the customer journey as website forms. With call tracking, you can gather various important data points that will help you optimize the performance of your marketing strategy.

What is call tracking?

Call tracking is an analytic system that uses a unique phone number as a way to identify, track and measure the number of interested users who contact your business. Call tracking allows business owners, and marketers to measure the value and legitimacy of calls driven by their marketing and advertising efforts through the phone numbers or text codes seen in ads. The tracking number, either a local or a toll-free number, is routed to your business number, making it easy to track various call metrics associated with the particular marketing campaign.

Toll-free vanity numbers are the most common use of tracking numbers, as they are easily interchangeable by the call to action, campaign goal, and also easy to remember by the intended audience. These vanity numbers can be used for traditional offline marketing campaigns, such as billboards, TV, and radio ads, or used for your online marketing campaigns that are live on your ads or website.

How does call tracking work?

Call tracking works by assigning a different traceable phone number to each of your marketing campaigns, whether they’re online or offline. Depending on the number of campaigns a business has launched, there can be several call tracking numbers running simultaneously. Each of these unique numbers gets forwarded to your main business phone number, or call center, allowing your team to answer as if the call were made directly to that line. Since the call first came in through a tracking number, you can get more insight on the caller than if they’d called your business line directly.

Call tracking allows you to compare the phone traffic generated by each tracking number. This provides clarity on which channels are providing the best return and generating the most conversions. The data that call tracking provides can easily be turned into actionable steps you can use to improve your business and your business’s budget.

Call tracking metrics to measure

When analyzing and comparing insights and data of your call tracking campaigns, some of the most valuable call tracking metrics you want to observe include:

Number of calls:  You want to record the quantity of calls your numbers are generating, as well as trends and patterns associated with these calls, like the hour, day, week, month, and year of the calls received.

Call length: The longer you have a prospect on a call, the more the calls are likely to result in a higher conversion rate. You want to filter out any illegitimate calls by setting a minimum call length as the threshold a call must reach before it’s considered a lead. This could be as short as 30 seconds and as long as a minute.

Call time of day and location: Find out what times of day and which locations produce the most calls and strongest leads. Once you know which calls are converting, you can adjust bids based on the types and quality of calls received from different locations, days, and times. If you know a particular area or time of day produces great phone leads, you can increase your bids for those parameters.

PPC landing page performance: Your call to action will result in either a form fill or a phone call. Track the performance of each of your PPC landing pages or ads to determine which are generating the most calls, most qualified leads, and the best conversion rate.

Keywords: Visitor-level call tracking through a website shows which keywords are driving the most traffic to your site, so you see what leads searched for to find your number.

Benefits of call tracking

While web analytics make it easy to see how your online efforts are performing, call tracking helps to accurately measure your offline efforts as well. This is most beneficial to brick-and-mortar or mobile businesses who want to scale their marketing to include other channels like print, tv, and billboards. Call tracking is the most reliable way to tie and track your campaigns through phone numbers, keywords, and phone codes. By placing tracking numbers or codes in commercials, billboards, flyers, and other traditional advertising outlets, you can measure this data alongside your online marketing data for a better idea of which campaigns are yielding the greatest ROI for your business.

Among the many benefits of call tracking, increased conversions are the most desired. In a typical customer journey, phone calls tend to occur near the final part of the process. Customers may have questions about a product, modification requests, or general customer service issues that need to be addressed. People who want to purchase a product are more likely to want to communicate with a live agent or staff member. A real person can provide the answers and also persuade the prospective buyer to close on the sale.

Best practices with call tracking

Optimize for mobile

Since smartphones are now the way to get in front of these “transaction ready” customers, optimizing your mobile website is a crucial step towards call tracking implementation. Make your ads and landing pages easy for visitors to ‘click to call’ from their mobile device.

Track at campaign-level

Assign a unique trackable phone number to each marketing campaign to determine which sources are driving your calls. This level of insight allows businesses to know which marketing channel or medium is generating the most leads and customers. 

Link calls to keywords

Search engine marketing captures the largest share of online marketing spend. Keyword-level tracking creates a unique phone number for each keyword source within a search, allowing businesses to link calls to specific actions on the site.

Write compelling ad text

Generate more phone calls by designing an ad that convinces the audience to call in the first place. Use your ad copy and visuals to highlight your value and give users a compelling reason to call. Be sure to highlight the benefit of customers getting to speak directly with a real person.

Schedule ads during business hours

Generate more leads from your phone calls by getting calls only when your team is available to answer the call. Create an ad schedule that drives calls during normal business hours. You can also outsource an after hours call center so that you don’t miss out on some calls outside of regular business hours. This helps you make the most of your budget without losing prospective business.

Call tracking tools 

There are many call tracking providers that can equip your business with the tools and metrics to close more leads through phone calls. Currently, the best call tracking software includes:

– CallCap

– CallFire

– CallRail

– Hubspot

– LiveVox

– JustCall

– Marchex

– 800response

– RingDNA

– Ringba

The best call tracking tools are the ones that are very simple, easy to install and implement. They have smooth user-interfaces, highly-interactive dashboards, and integrate seamlessly with third-party marketing or sales platforms. Find the software that meets the needs of your business and budget.

Most consumers now spend most of their journeys online, but even so, people still want to talk to actual people whenever they are nearing a purchase decision or looking for answers that articles and reviews can’t provide. Implementing a call tracking software will allow your business to reach more of your targeted audience that are interested in what you sell or offer. Call tracking allows businesses to truly get to know their customers and understand their behavior, and dig deeper into your customer insights to measure and improve your business’ success. Give us a call to get your business set up with the right call tracking strategy.