9 Undeniable Benefits to Call Tracking
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If you are buying or selling digital marketing services, there are three metrics that should concern you the most – Leads, Conversions, Revenue.
As an agency, we get it! We get that clients want to see the bottom line – how much did they pay and how much did they make.
Complete reporting of these metrics is not possible without call tracking. If phone call tracking is not included in your reports, you are truly missing the boat!
You should understand where your calls are coming from so you can determine what marketing channels are working, what keywords people search to find your products or services, and how your staff is handling these calls.
Call tracking is vital for all channels and it makes sense to segment your tracking reports. We segment tracking for organic, paid search and Google My Business (GMB).
We were surprised to learn that GMB was generating significantly more calls than we thought since GMB Insights is only tracking click-to-call. Once we set up call tracking, all calls were being reported and the value of GMB increased substantially for our agency and clients.
In the example below, GMB Insights reported only 62 calls. Our custom Data Studio report with the CallRail add-on through Supermetrics was able to provide the complete picture…176 calls!
It was previously assumed that if add a call tracking number to GMB, it would negatively affect your search rankings and ruin your citation profile online. That is not the case. You just need to move the primary GMB number as an alternative number and place the call tracking number as the primary.
What Is Call Tracking?
Simply put, phone call tracking is a way to help you to get valuable insight from your marketing campaigns. There are many tracking services available with similar packages. You pay a monthly fee and buy numbers that are forwarded to your primary number. We use CallRail. They are competitively priced, they have great support, a well-designed dashboard, and the reports are top notch. I’d say the most valuable features are the call recordings and call detail.
Setup will require some support and I’d recommend working with your web developer or tech-savvy person to help you get started. GMB is easy as previously stated. Paid search and organic setup require a little work. A tracking mechanism embeds in your website, and when installed, the tracking number is dynamically installed on your website. This allows you to follow the trail of the calls from your organic and paid search campaigns so you can adjust your strategies accordingly.
A Little More Understanding
As call tracking is the preferred method used to track the sources of the calls and any following conversions, it’s essential to understand precisely how it works. Tracking uses a range of phone numbers which forward to your business telephone number. Your marketing team can then track which channel the call came in from – organic, PPC, retargeting, etc. – and these channels will be assigned a unique number that can identify where the call came in. So, what does call tracking allow your marketing team to accomplish?
- They can link the number of calls they get to decide how efficient each marketing channel is.
- Calculate the ROI for each marketing campaign.
- Measure the cost of each different advertisement
- Refresh the outlook on the marketing budget, allowing you to allocate funds to the right channels.
Whether you are thinking about offline marketing channels like newspaper ads and billboards or using online channels for marketing like PPC and SEO, call tracking is a useful tool all around.
Benefits of Call Tracking
1. Complete Call Details
You can receive detailed reports about the number of calls you receive as well as trends and patterns associated with these calls. This allows you to determine which of your marketing strategies yield longer, more in-depth calls that are likely to result in a higher conversion rate. You can also know full caller id data, what time of day and which locations produce the most calls, and the largest percentage of conversions. This can be crucial when trying to maximize your budget for PPC campaigns.
2. Better Page Optimization
High traffic landing pages deserve your attention. We use SEMrush’s Organic Traffic Insights tool to track the performance of these pages. Call tracking can help you determine which landing pages generate the most calls, the most quality leads, and best conversion rate. From there, you can allocate costs, optimize the page for semantically related keywords and perform A/B testing.
3. Complete Conversion Analytics
Mostly, your marketing campaigns should attract targeted traffic from intent keywords around your top revenue-generating products and services. It’s critical to know if your traffic is converting, so measure beyond form-fills and click-to-call. Call tracking provides you with the complete picture to gain a better understanding of how to allocate your marketing budget.
4. Segmenting Calls By Medium
It’s important to understand the way that paid, and organic traffic is influencing your call conversions. It can help you to get where you should be focusing your efforts – and budget – as a business. If you are getting more calls coming in from your PPC campaigns, you want to be able to understand which campaign and keyword are driving more calls to the business. A lot of companies rely on Google Analytics here, but if there hasn’t been a click-through, then Google Analytics has no information to feedback to you. By segmenting the calls by medium, you can channel your money the right way and provide recommendations for your customer acquisition strategies.
5. Serve Local Numbers to Multiple Locations
Call tracking can enable you to show local numbers to people based on where they are searching. Google often has location services on with your browser, picking up on where you are seeking from and can recommend you the best facilities in your area. It does the same thing for your customers. If your business serves people in three separate locations, you could provide local numbers to web searchers, which means that you can increase call leads and conversion rates. Geo-targeted campaigns for each area can give you localized information about where most of your consumers are.
6. Advanced Call Management
Callrail has a call scheduler which allows you to send calls to your office during the day and to your cell phone or answering service in the evening. You can forward calls to different employees each day and even upload an audio file for your greeting (get a pro to record it for you on fiverr).
You can get instant email notifications of missed calls including transcriptions. Finally, you can use one of your tracking numbers to place outbound calls to customers, enabling you to track and record these calls.
7. Time Of Day Optimization
Call tracking teaches your marketing team a lot of information, but the one thing that it can show them is when the business is getting calls through the day. If your marketing team can understand when people are searching and calling your business, they can then create targeted ads and campaigns to schedule for those times of the day. All of this can be an effective way to generate more revenue for your business.
8. Better Customer Service
Let’s be honest: as much as technology has evolved to allow us to speak to companies over an online chat facility, we all still love to pick up the phone to talk to a human. Most companies don’t have the ‘old fashioned’ phone call facility anymore in favor of automated robotic responses directing people to online FAQs and chat links. However, if you can offer people to call your sales team, you should use it. Tracking calls and keywords can allow you a better understanding of the desires of your customers. Not only that, you’ll know where they’re coming from, and this information can help you to develop in more sophisticated ways. It’s here that quality assurance for phone calls comes in, and you are recording those calls and listening to the way that your team dialogues with customers can give you an idea of where you need to improve.
9. ROI
Our final and most important benefit of call tracking is your return on your campaign investments. Call tracking will help you identify your most successful campaigns and allocate your funds accordingly. As mentioned earlier, we were able to identify a huge discrepancy with phone calls on Google My Business and show our clients the true value of this channel. This is especially important for paid search campaigns since Google Ads produces a great ROI if done correctly. With Google Ads, we are able to show our clients all conversions, not just form-fills, checkouts and purchases. Report everything and you’ll be able to make better decisions and generate revenue where it counts.
Which Industries Should Use Call Tracking?
Now we know all the reasons that call tracking is the next best thing for your business to invest in, we need to understand which industry will find it the most effective. Every business is unique, which means that the marketing metrics that work for one company won’t necessarily work for another. If your business is in any of the following industries, it could be an excellent idea to consider call tracking as your next big marketing strategy.
- Home Services. Businesses in this industry will find that the majority of their customer contact comes from phone calls. Over half of all smartphone users complete purchases from their device. With the right keywords and advertising – and the correct local phone numbers – you could be beating your competitors back.
- Medical Services. Click to call is a big deal, and if people are relying on their smartphones to contact an emergency doctor or dentist, then it’s worth investing in call tracking.
- Lawyers. Every phone call to a legal office could be a way to generate profit for a business. Tracking those calls is vital; otherwise, you may not know your exact ROI.
- Automotive. A car is the second biggest purchase that someone will make in their life, and this is why most people prefer to speak to a car expert over the phone. Tracking these calls can tell you how customers have managed to find you.
Running any marketing campaign without the full information is not going to go well, and if your business is one that relies on conversions via calls and not online forms, the ability to track these conversions is going to make a massive difference to the quality of service that you offer. It will also have an impact on your ROI.
Using the right call tracking company to help your business is essential, as it’s so much more than just a marketing metric. If you do it right and monitor it correctly, it can be a way for you to understand all of your marketing efforts and make them work better for you.