Modern businesses know the benefits of learning as much as possible about the people who interact with online ads, the customer website, and the rest of the online user experience. Knowing online user demographics as well as user location information and other important metrics can help shape how you target the users important to your bottom line. Are you overlooking the similar benefits of call tracking? What is Call Tracking? How can you implement it? Most importantly, how can it benefit your business?
What Is Call Tracking?
In general, call tracking systems allow you to identify campaigns that drive user phone calls to your business. Services provide you with unique phone numbers linked to each campaign. As a result, incoming phone calls identify the source of the call, whether from an organic search, a click on a banner ad, or some other source. Call tracking provides you with information regarding the efficacy of converting your marketing efforts into phone calls, a metric that was previously difficult to measure.
Did the trade show you attended lead to sales? Are local customers choosing to call ahead to order from your mobile page rather than purchasing a product online? Are your offline efforts resulting in contact from your customers? Call tracking can address these questions and more.
How Can Call Tracking Benefit Your Business?
We’ve already mentioned some of the ways online metrics help businesses optimize marketing efforts. As it turns out, call tracking provides similar benefits to your business.
Complete Your Metrics
While online conversions continue to garner most of the attention of savvy marketers, it is important to realize that a large share of contact with your business still happens offline. Even after exposure to your product or brand’s online advertising, users still choose to walk into a brick and mortar location, call ahead and make an order or ask a question, or send an email.
While it’s still difficult to track attribution for in-person visits short of a “how did you hear about us” survey, call tracking can fill in some of the gaps in your business’s attribution framework. A more complete set of metrics helps guide your future decisions for your advertising budget allocation.
No New Process to Learn
Implementing call tracking is fairly easy, and the information it provides simply fills in the gaps as mentioned, helping you make decisions regarding your ad spending. Since there’s no new complex set of algorithms and techniques to learn – you simply receive another aspect of conversion information – you don’t have to dedicate time to learning them. Simply use the call tracking information to further inform decisions you’re already making.
Jump Into the Smartphone Age
Of course, you already knew that mobile searches via Google surpassed desktop searches beginning back in 2015. However, searches for business information on a mobile device often take a different path than those on a desktop. The ability to click on a phone number in an ad and call it adds another dimension to mobile search that just isn’t a factor on a desktop search.
Tracking customer calls generated by mobile searches, when used in conjunction with tracking click-throughs and other online metrics, provides a better sense of how interconnected your marketing channels really are. In addition, you can track mobile calls by keyword, providing you with an even deeper knowledge of how your mobile users are accessing your information.
Track Your Offline Efforts
As mentioned above, it is difficult to track offline conversions inspired by online efforts, such as in-person visits prompted by an online ad. Similarly, it is difficult to track offline efforts like radio ads, television ads, billboards, and other print ads unless the conversion happens online and you ask users to complete a survey on where they heard about your business.
Call tracking allows you to distinguish which offline marketing effort led to your user phone calls. If a user saw a billboard ad that prompted a phone call, you’ll have an indicator of billboard success. Though not all of your offline efforts result in trackable conversions, adding call tracking can help you form a more complete picture.
Improve Caller Experiences
Similar to the metrics provided by a PPC search, call tracking gives you rich information regarding who is calling you, where they’re calling from, and the ad that led to the call. Depending on the ad and call history information you log, you may even know which product the user is interested in.
You can use all of this information to better inform your customer service interactions with the caller. Or, you can route calls from product-specific ads to the correct department, eliminating unnecessary transfers and wait time. Finally, you can use the caller’s region to route the call to a representative nearest them with the most accurate local product information.
Get a More Complete ROI Picture
In addition to helping you track a larger percentage of conversions and determine the efficacy of your campaigns, call tracking provides a better vision of the return on your marketing investment (ROI). When you know which campaigns are leading to user engagement, you have a starting point for your ad spend decisions. When you have a more complete picture of how your campaigns provide a return on your investment, however, the ROI can now inform decisions you make regarding whether to continue that investment.
Potential for Integration
Although the additional metrics and information provided by call tracking flows seamlessly with your current measures, providing almost no learning curve for analysis, any time businesses add additional information busy marketers wonder how they’ll find the time to track it all.
Fortunately, since you’re already using other tools to track your other metrics, most call tracking services integrate into your existing tools fairly seamlessly. Most services integrate with Google Analytics, allowing you to view your call tracking statistics alongside your online click stats. In fact, we recommend using a service that will integrate with Analytics, so you can perform side-by-side comparisons of how every channel prompts phone conversions as well as online.
Overall, call tracking provides a fairly straightforward set of data you can analyze along with your online metrics to develop a more informed view of all of your marketing efforts. With a more complete picture, you can make better decisions regarding where to spend your marketing dollars and focus on channels that provide a better ROI.