With smartphones being a ubiquitous fact of life, it’s more important than ever that businesses streamline the way prospective customers can call. When a customer puts in the effort to pick up the phone and call, that call is 10x more likely to lead to a sale over any other form of communication. Not only that, but according to Salesforce, about 92% of business still takes place over the phone in the digital era. Therefore, it is useful to know where these phone calls originate, and which ones convert to the highest ROI.
Call tracking allows you to determine which marketing and advertising campaigns are motivating people to pick up the phone and call. Understanding how callers find you can result in more optimized campaigns and bigger gains in sales. Best of all, call tracking can be set up for both online and offline marketing campaigns, including pay-per-click, social, print, and broadcast, allowing you to maximize the channels that drive the best results for you.
The simplest way to track phone calls is to use multiple static phone numbers. Call tracking software can provide as many numbers as you need, as well as a centralized dashboard to manage them. The biggest names in call tracking software, such as CallRail and PhoneWagon, also allow you to use Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) to more effectively track online advertising by source.
Specifically, DNI refers to a JavaScript code snippet installed on every page of your website, which swaps the hard-coded phone number on your site for a specific phone number according to the online source a visitor arrived from. For example, if a visitor arrives to your site from a Facebook Ad, one phone number will display on your website, and a different number will display for a visitor arriving from a Google Ad campaign.
Because DNI can only be installed on your website and are not usually an option on third-party sites such as Facebook or Yelp, it is recommended to keep the static phone numbers on these sites as consistent as possible to avoid harming your organic SEO. By using one static phone number for your website as the foundation of your DNI and a second for your online listings, you can ensure your SEO remains consistent across every third-party platform.
After you have your static numbers and DNI set up, you should make sure your Google Analytics account is optimized as well. By having your Google Analytics integrated with your call tracking, you will have a better understanding of what customer trends and behaviors lead to call conversions, and all in one place. Having a more complete way to report and analyze actionable data is the hallmark of any effective marketing strategy, and it is in your best interest to set up the Google Analytics integration right from the get-go.
So now you have your call tracking software installed, and you’re receiving analytics. How do you optimize your call tracking for conversions to drive sales?
Here are four steps to using call tracking to measure your campaigns:
Step 1: Do a Phone Number Audit
– Make a comprehensive list of every place your phone number is currently displayed, or could be added. This includes all digital and traditional media, such as website, social media, email signatures, PPC ads, print mailings, billboards, television ads, or vehicles graphics.
Step 2: Use Call Scoring
– Determine which marketing channels have the highest call quality by using call scoring and tracking to figure out how long and effective conversations are. Be sure to optimize for best quality calls; culling lengthy calls that don’t lead to a conversion.
Step 3: Analyze Results
– Call results will help you understand channels that were effective or ineffective. Most call tracking software applications can spot specific keywords from call transcripts to give you further insights on PPC campaigns. CallRail, for example, provides intelligent keyword suggestions based on tracking results.
Step 4: Update Campaigns
– Brainstorm ways to improve campaigns and analytics going forward. Continually analyzing results and updating campaigns is the best way to keep up on ever-changing motivations and behaviors of your target audience.
From intelligent attribution analytics to PPC keyword spotting, call tracking can be an invaluable tool to help you further optimize your digital advertising efforts in lockstep with the most ubiquitously used business channel to date: the phone call.