Businesses rely on digital marketing to attract new customers, increase revenue, and improve brand awareness. But one of the challenges is calculating the return on investment from SEO campaigns, social media efforts, and search ads.
But for service-based businesses that want to track web forms and inbound phone calls, it can be even more challenging to determine where the business is coming from – which is where call tracking in digital marketing comes in.
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What Is Call Tracking?
Call tracking helps you collect data from phone conversations with customers to reveal exactly which marketing campaign drove calls. For example, you can identify the specific ad, website, and keywords that prompted the call to inform future campaigns.
With call tracking software, you can glean even more information, like whether the caller purchased before, received a quote, booked a consultation, and other conversions. This data can be used to determine the effectiveness of your website, social media, marketing campaigns, or other promotional avenues. Otherwise, you can’t determine the ROI of your marketing efforts because the data stops when the call happens.
Why Does Call Tracking Matter for Marketing Analytics?
You’re likely already tracking metrics for your digital marketing campaigns, but if you’re not using call tracking, you’re missing a big part of your campaign performance.
Call tracking gives you an idea of your customer’s calling behavior by assigning a unique number to each of your marketing campaigns. Incoming calls are tracked using special software that can be customized to your needs.
This is important when you’re:
- Running ads on Google
- Using social media
- Relying on local SEO
When you have multiple campaigns on multiple channels and get an influx of calls, you won’t know where all the calls are coming from. Did they see a social media post, an advertisement, or a business listing in a directory? Did they find you through traditional print media like a brochure or flyer?
If you only have one number – or one number per department – you can’t tell where these calls are coming from.
How Does Call Tracking Software Work?
Call tracking assigns a unique phone number for each type of phone call you may receive. For example, your website, social media ad, and billboard will have a phone number that routes the call through call tracking software before it hits your desk. Then, you know precisely which marketing channel sent them to you.
Dynamic Number Insertion
There are many ways a customer may find your website, but it’s essential to be able to separate them from one another. Dynamic number insertion offers a solution by displaying specific phone numbers on the website to differentiate callers and how they reached your site.
Dynamic number insertion can be used for many channels, including:
- Search ads
- Organic search
- Facebook Ads
- YouTube
- Referral sites
If someone clicks on your Google ad, they’ll see one number. They’ll see a different number if they click to your site from a Facebook post. This gives you an idea of where each of your calls are coming from.
How to Use Call Tracking for Digital Marketing
Gaining insights from phone calls to optimize your marketing campaigns requires a few tools and technologies in your Martech stack, but here are the steps:
Track Calls and Attribute Them
Tracking campaign effectiveness has been around since the early days of advertising. In digital marketing, this comes in the form of attributing clicks to conversions, but it isn’t easy to create a definitive attribution with prior digital touchpoints.
Dynamic number insertion makes this possible using JavaScript code to replace static phone numbers with a unique number for each customer. All these numbers go to the same place, but the dynamic insertion allows you to associate a specific call to your online campaigns.
Unify Caller Data Across Multiple Sources
Call tracking captures data for each unique consumer that’s contained in a caller profile. This can come from caller data types like customer journey data, first-party data, third-party demographic data, and call data like the duration or time of day.
With all these datasets, you can build a caller profile and associate it to the phone call, giving you an idea of what marketing campaigns are driving phone calls.
Analyze Conversations to Classify Behaviors
Not every phone call converts. You may get 100 calls daily, but only 10 end up in a purchase or another conversion. It may even take a few calls before they finally take that step. How can you separate those prospects from the bulk of the calls?
Each time someone calls, they tell you where they are in the buyer journey. They’ll say things like, “I have to talk to my partner” or “I’ll be in touch when I get paid.” This data is critical for understanding the value of different conversations.
By analyzing call conversations, you can glean critical marketing intelligence to predict future calls, track milestones on the path to conversion, and personalize the customer journey.
For example, you can learn:
- Time and date
- Lead Source
- Geographic location
- First-time or repeat caller
- Purchase urgency
- Product or service interest
- Barriers to purchase
- Call outcome
- Revenue generated
Optimize Campaigns with Call Data
Gaining information from your campaigns is only one piece of the puzzle. You have to use that information to optimize future campaigns and get better results. For example, if one campaign is more successful at driving calls that convert, then you would want to see those numbers lined up in a report.
Get Started with Call Tracking
Since the rise of omnichannel marketing, integrating call tracking is essential to maximizing your marketing efforts. At Full Circle SEM, we have an exclusive call-tracking process that we developed in partnership with one of the premier call-tracking companies.
With one of the most comprehensive call-tracking product suites available, we can give you simple, accurate call-tracking technology that’s easy to maintain for deeper insights into your marketing efforts. Contact us today to take your brand to the next level!
