Reasons Why Call Tracking is an Essential Marketing Tool

Is call tracking yet another useless ‘bell and whistle’ companies incorporate into their marketing strategy, or is there something to the recent trend? If your business is engaging in any kind of digital marketing, it may actually be one of the smartest technologies you can integrate into your process. Let me show you how call tracking works, plus explain how it can benefit your business.

The Importance of Marketing Analytics

I often talk about how to measure your marketing success because it’s an important component in the overall success of your business. When you know what metrics to track and have the right insights, you can:

• Find out if your marketing efforts are generating ROI.
• Increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns over time.
• Redirect resources towards marketing strategies that generate the highest ROI.
• Optimize your marketing budget.
• And more.

The best part is that you can get the information you need using a free platform such as Google Analytics. This makes it one of the most cost-effective ways to implement a project, even if you don't have the budget.

How Call Tracking Can Help in Marketing Analytics

Whatever industry you are in, there is a good chance that your business gets phone calls. Online-only businesses often include a phone number in order to facilitate the conversion process for potential customers who prefer live assistance and a human voice. This adds up. According to BIA , calls to businesses via mobile devices have increased by more than 110 percent in the past four years.

All those calls could come from many sources. Inbound calls can be triggered by Google ads, social media, Google organic search, or other offline sources like radio and billboards. You should also consider that the channel someone begins on might not be the one that converts them.

Without some assistance, it can be difficult to distinguish the flow of calls. However, it is easy to identify where they came from if each source has a unique number. It's easy to give a visitor a unique number via your website or landing pages. You can manually add the unique number to the pages you choose in some cases. You can also use a program that changes the number depending on how the visitor arrives at the page to create dynamic marketing. This can be done by simply adding a plugin to the code.

On the back end, all your toll-free and local numbers will be redirected to your primary number. This means that you don't have to make any changes to the way you work or how you handle your calls. Specialized call tracking software captures data about each caller to aid in your decision-making.

Other Benefits of Call Tracking

Call tracking software captures data in the background, and you can use it in many ways to benefit your company and marketing.

Call Analytics

Call conversions are a metric that is often found as part of an analytics suite, as well as call duration. The call length can tell you quite a bit. For example, an average call time of five minutes may suggest that you’re getting quality leads, especially if you have great conversion rates. However, if your agents are staying on the phone for more than ten minutes or so, it could signify that you need to give prospects more information on your website and other marketing channels.

Call Monitoring

Call monitoring allows customers to quickly and easily find the root cause of an issue. It can also be used as a training tool. If there is a difference in conversion rates among reps, it could be due to how they handle calls. You can listen to their calls and coach them. To learn more about high-performing reps, you can listen to their calls and share their information.

Call Routing

Advertisers love the ability to route calls to the right agent for their needs. You can send people who saw an ad to specific reps or route them by medium.

Common Features of Call Tracking Software

Let's suppose, for instance, that you don't use any call tracking platform and that a prospect calls your sales number. Your rep properly asks the prospect how they heard about your business, and the prospect says they ran an online search. Great! You’ve got the data you need! Consider this.

Chances are, your prospects don’t know what they click on or searched for. It could be organic search, Google AdWords campaigns, or even call extensions within them. Call tracking software breaks it down even more for you so you can tell which click made the difference.

Campaign-Level Tracking

Campaign-level tracking can provide insights into both your online and offline marketing campaigns. For instance, you may have one number for your billboards, another number for your radio ads, and a third for your PPC campaign. Therefore, it gives a high-level overview rather than a granular one.

Keyword-Level Tracking

There’s a chance that you’re using lots of keywords in your PPC ads. Some advanced call tracking platforms are capable of keyword-level tracking, which would display a unique number to each user to track the keywords that resulted in phone calls. In addition to keywords, this method allows tracking other call source details that are important, such as the search engine, landing page, ad campaign, and ad group.

If you’re using Google Analytics for attribution and conversion tracking, you’ll see the campaign and the keyword, so you’ll get a clearer picture of what’s driving your calls and conversions.

Multi-Channel Attribution Tracking

Marketing attribution presents a challenge because a customer is unlikely to make a purchase the first time. Per Google search , someone searching for a tee-shirt has 1.7 touchpoints before they make a purchase. It jumps to 3.4 touchpoints if they are buying a laptop. A consumer might run hundreds of searches for something like travel in the months before the event, the search engine states . This can lead to many touchpoints.

A traditional analytics program may only be able to look at one touchpoint. This means that a person who clicked on a PPC advertisement, found you later organically, and then engaged on social media with you may only be recorded as a PPC convert.

How Call Tracking Can Help Marketing Agencies

Call tracking programs are often used by consultants and marketing agencies. This helps us to identify campaigns that perform better than others so we can allocate more marketing budget to those areas. This is important to identify which channels are producing phone calls, which strategy generates the most conversions, and which strategy is the most cost-effective.

Your marketing professional might be able to link your CRM with your call tracking software to ensure all customer data is in one place. This will allow you to create highly targeted campaigns and keep your customers happy.

How Your Business Should Invest in Call Tracking Software for Marketing Analytics

Call tracking software provides your company with the data it needs to make informed decisions. This means that you can make significant gains by reducing unnecessary spending and increasing your conversions.

Get Help Bringing Your Marketing, Sales, and Business into Alignment

As a business and digital marketing consultant, I help small and mid-size businesses level up by bringing in the right resources and strategies for their needs. Often, this involves leveraging tools like call tracking software. If you’re interested in exploring business growth options for your business, contact me for a complimentary consultation .

You can also read this article on my website, Why Call Tracking Has Become an Essential Marketing Tool.

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