In today’s modern world, many businesses rely heavily on online marketing to acquire new customers, increase revenue & profits, and improve the exposure of their brand. Whether running online advertisements, engaging in an SEO campaign, or leveraging social media platforms, internet marketing should be a staple in the marketing plan for any business.
One hurdle that many companies face is effectively tracking the performance of their various online strategies, especially when it comes down to calculating return on investment from each specific avenue. For many product-based businesses that have an eCommerce platform and sell online, there are several ways to track where your purchases are coming from.
But what about service-based businesses that rely on inbound phone calls and website form fills to generate customers? This is where implementing call tracking software can come in handy!
What Is Call Tracking?
Call tracking software allows marketers to collect data from phone conversations with customers to demonstrate exactly which marketing campaign or tactic drove calls and how. For example, if you call a company that uses call tracking, that company can identify the ad, website, and even keywords that prompted you to call.
And when you’re on the phone, conversation analytics can be used to analyze the language used during the call to find out if you’ve purchased something, received a quote, booked an appointment – or what experts in marketers call conversions. You can then use the data to attribution to marketing campaigns, ad optimization, websites, social media, and other promotional mediums to attract more valuable customers. higher value to the phone.
Without call tracking, you can’t demonstrate the ROI of your marketing efforts generating sales calls because your data trail freezes when the prospect picks up the phone.
Want to understand how your marketing campaigns are performing and how far off potential customers are on the road to conversion? You can do this through marketing analytics and call tracking.
How Call Tracking Helps In Marketing Analytics
As a business owner, you may already be tracking various metrics related to your online marketing campaigns. However, if you haven’t integrated call tracking into your business, you’re missing a critical view of your campaign performance.
Call tracking software provides a clear picture of your customer’s calling behavior and the results of your marketing efforts.
Call tracking involves assigning a unique phone number to each of your marketing campaigns. Incoming calls from this number will then be tracked through special software that can be customized to your needs. The software provides in-depth analytics for online and offline marketing campaigns.
When Do You Need Call Tracking Software?
Let’s run through a practical example of where call tracking software can benefit your business. Suppose you run a local air conditioning repair & service company. You’ve decided to leap into digital marketing for your business and you are now doing several things online:
- Running advertisements on Google
- Doing local SEO to get your Google Business Listing more visible
- Using social media to promote your services
After a month or so, you start getting more phone calls and, as a result, more customers than you ever have before. This is fantastic! But how do you know where all of these new phone calls are coming from?
- Did they see your advertisement?
- Did they find your Google listing when searching locally?
- Did they see one of your social media posts?
- Did they see your billboard, brochure, or some other form of printed marketing material?
Chances are, you have one single phone number that all of these new customers are calling and as a result, you have no way of truly knowing where these phone calls originated from.
Wouldn’t you want to know if your SEO is outperforming your advertisements, or if your social media marketing is making your phones ring off the hook?
If the answer is YES, then you should probably consider some kind of call tracking software.
How Does Call Tracking Software Work?
The basis of how call tracking works relies on having unique phone numbers for specific types of phone calls you might be receiving. There are various levels of complexity to this concept, but for this article, we will keep things simple.
Let’s take a look at a real-world example:
The screenshot above was taken from the call tracking software used by a TDI client. The column on the left has the caller’s information (hidden for privacy purposes) and the column on the right shows where these inbound phone calls came from:
- Billboard (phone number displayed on a highway billboard)
- Google Business Listing (phone number displayed on their Google business profile)
- Website (phone number displayed on their website)
When a potential customer sees one of the phone numbers and makes a call, the call routes through the call tracking software first and then gets relayed to the business just like any other phone call would.
The business owner now can understand exactly how the caller found the business before making the phone call, providing the insight needed to make better marketing decisions!
Now, let’s take it a step further and explore a more advanced concept called dynamic number insertion.
What is Dynamic Number Insertion?
Perhaps you want to take a more detailed look at your website callers and understand how they found your website in the first place. Because there are multiple ways in which a customer can find your website, it is important to be able to separate those website callers from one another. This is where dynamic number insertion comes into play.
Dynamic number insertion allows you to display a specific phone number to your website visitors based on how they reached your website. This is how you gain a competitive edge and a better understanding of which digital marketing efforts are producing the greatest return on investment for your business.
Some of the most common sources we use dynamic number insertion for include:
- Google Ads
- Bing Ads
- Organic search (organic visitors from Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.)
- Facebook Ads
- YouTube
- Referral websites (Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc.)
If a customer clicks on your Google advertisement, they will see a specific number for Google Ads on your website. If a customer clicks on a Facebook post that directs them to your website, they will see a specific number for Facebook on your website.
Want to Learn More About Call Tracking?
Now that you have a pretty good understanding of what call tracking software does and how beneficial it can be, perhaps you’re ready to have a conversation on how to get it properly set up for your own business!
If you have any specific questions about how call tracking can work for you, or if you’re interested in working with The Digital Intellect for any number of marketing services, drop us a line or give us a call at (561) 444-2112!
