What’s Call Tracking?

Your business has a phone number, right? What happens when people call it?

Before you say “people aren’t interested in calling me,” consider the stats: 65% of Fortune 500 companies say phone calls are their highest quality lead source, while 61% of local mobile searches result in a phone call. People want to talk to a human being when they’re making a decision, resulting in a huge sales opportunity for you.

Call tracking helps you understand how customers reach you, whether they’re calling from ads on a website or on a billboard. It can help you determine which marketing methods lead to the most sales.

For example, imagine you run marketing for a healthcare clinic. You might be running multiple campaigns at once:

• PPC ads
• Billboard ads
• Radio ads

With call tracking, you’ll be able to see which ad campaign generates the most phone calls, as well as which ad campaigns lead to sales. Maybe you think your billboard is bringing in all the phone calls, when really it’s your PPC campaign. Insights like this can help you streamline your marketing to focus on the most effective advertising channels.

What Does My Business Get Out of It?

Many people have robust analytics systems to measure how many people visit their website. That’s important info, but it doesn’t account for all those people who pick up the phone and call your business. These phone calls represent your leads, and often they’re more likely to result in a sale than an email or website click.

Call tracking has benefits that are impossible to ignore:

Determine What’s Working

Just because you spent thousands on a billboard doesn’t mean it will lead to sales. Call tracking can help you figure out what campaigns are working and which ones are falling flat.

Correctly Attribute Marketing Efforts

Sometimes our gut feelings are wrong. We think certain campaigns are successful, but we’re unable to back it up with data. Call tracking allows you to correctly attribute your leads and phone calls to their sources.

Prove ROI to Yourself or Your Boss

When you’re throwing money into advertising efforts, you want to be sure that you’re getting a return on your investment. Call tracking can help you accurately prove ROI to yourself, your investors, and your boss.

Save Money

Call tracking allows you to figure out which landing pages and which efforts are converting, which allows you to reduce wasteful spending. A better understanding of how customers get to you-- the cost-per-response-- can result in huge financial gains.

Recover Leads

Call tracking can help efficiently recapture business. If a lead is lost-- say a homeowner wants to shop around for the best price-- then you can cater your follow-up call to that concern. More information gives you a greater ability to determine what a potential customer needs to complete a transaction.

Leverage Integrations with Other Tools

Call tracking can be integrated into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools as well as into Google Analytics, Salesforce, and other software solutions, providing a seamless view of marketing performance.

Make Better Decisions in the Future

How can you make future plans if you don’t know what’s working now? Call tracking helps you determine your most effective marketing channels so that you can focus your efforts (and your budget) in the right places.

Is Call Tracking Hard to Do?

No.

Call tracking can be done at a very basic level so you can get a sweeping view of where your calls are coming from, or you can set up advanced call tracking so you can see results at a granular level. You can do call tracking for free with Google Analytics and PPC platforms, and you can splurge on helpful software solutions.

At the most basic level, you can get multiple phone numbers, one for each campaign, with a service like Grasshopper. You can track which numbers get the most calls.

With AdWords, you can get a different number for every ad, allowing you to see which ads perform best. You can put different numbers on direct mail campaigns, email campaigns, flyers, and more.

Here, you can see two numbers side by side. One is used for PPC, and it gets significantly more calls than the one used on billboards. It also shows that the calls from the PPC number are much longer in length:

Pros and Cons of Call Tracking

Getting Started

Getting started is the hardest part. That’s why we’ve compiled all we know about call tracking into this guide. You’ll learn how to leverage call tracking for your business, as well as how to install and manage it. We’ll set you up for success so you can determine what marketing channels are working, so you can make the best business decisions moving forward.