What is call tracking, and why should you care?
You've probably heard that call tracking is important for your business, but why is this the case?
Online marketing campaigns typically drive traffic through multiple channels, such as paid search, email marketing, and social media. These channels work together to drive people to your website, where they can take any number of actions.
As a business owner, you want these people to eventually become your customers. However, when they reach your website, this probably won't happen right away. Instead, they might show their interest or try to do more research before determining if your business best addresses their needs. Only then will they hand over their hard earned cash.
To understand and improve your marketing efforts, you need to be able to clearly visualize what is working for you and what isn't. You need to know what activities are causing people to show more interest in what you have to offer, as well as understand their behaviours and how your internet presence can influence these behaviours.
One way of capturing marketing data is by tracking content form submissions. Almost all websites with contact forms will automatically track them. So why don't we do the same for calls?
Despite the fact that we are living in an increasingly digital area, people are still calling businesses, especially when they're interested. In fact, the number of calls to businesses is only increasing as smartphone capabilities improve. Phones now, making it easier to call a business than ever before. As well, according to digital marketing expert Neil Patel, calls convert 10 to 15 times more often than web leads.
If you don't track calls, you are losing valuable data. Calls are far more important than you think.
How Does It Work?
Call tracking provides you with data that shows which marketing efforts are driving calls to your business. In fact, if you don't track calls, you might not be tracking up to 80% of your conversions. Without accurate conversion data, you can't appropriately allocate resources towards your most effective marketing efforts. You're basically throwing money at all sorts of channels, with no idea of which ones are giving you the best ROI. You won't have any idea which pages, tactics, and campaigns are effective and ineffective, as you will only be seeing part of the picture.
Check out this handy infographic we made to visualize how this works:
To track calls from different sources, digital marketers use something called dynamic number insertion. What this means is that your leads will see a different phone number to call, based on the channel and geographic location they are on. All of these numbers will lead back to your actual number, so the visitors will contact you directly. However, the usefulness of this is that you will receive data about the referring URL, search keywords, landing pages, and ads the caller came through. As well, the tracking code will remember the original channel for each visitor, so they will see the same tracking number each time they visit your site.
When Is It Useful?
Unlike traditional marketing, online marketing has the ability to clearly demonstrate which activities are yielding specific results. When you have this information, you can then make adjustments as needed and optimize your activities.
Imagine you're working on an email campaign for your business which redirects visitors to a unique landing page. There might be a form on there for visitors to fill out, but there might also be a phone number at the top. If you only track the form submissions, you're completely missing data about the email campaign. You won't know how many people called your business because of that specific email. Call tracking will give you that data so you can see how successful the campaign is, and learn and make improvements for the next email campaign you do.
Call tracking can track calls from a wide variety of platforms. If someone calls your business from directly accessing your website, an ad campaign, Google My Business, or even from Yelp, you will know and be able to see exact data. This data will then allow you to better understand your consumers, drive conversions, and help your business flourish.
