What Is Phone Call Tracking and Monitoring Software?

Phone Call Tracking, also known simply as “call tracking” in the marketing world, is a methodology of tracking incoming lead calls and attributing the calls to specific marketing campaigns. Put simply, call tracking can help you determine what marketing initiative led to the phone call.

Why Is Phone Call Tracking and Monitoring Important

Call tracking is exceptionally important, especially if you are spending money on either traditional or online marketing initiatives. Keep in mind though that call tracking and monitoring is not cheap, so if your marketing budget is already very small, and you are only doing one marketing initiative, you might not actually need call tracking right off the bat. In other words, don’t spend all your budget on tracking and very little on the actual campaigns themselves!

That said, there are two main areas where call tracking can be exceptionally helpful.

Track Lead Attribution and Provide Marketing Analytics

Using call tracking, you can successfully track each inbound call to your business and see exactly what marketing channel led to the call. This is exceptionally important since it will allow you to understand whether that great lead came in via your Google PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign, from SEO, or from your Facebook ads.

Additionally, at an aggregate level, you will see which marketing channels are supplying the highest number of phone calls, which can then be compared against your marketing spend for that same channel.

Understanding which marketing channels created the most phone calls can help you decide which marketing campaigns are worth investing more in and which should be reduced or eliminated altogether.

Improve Sales and Support Quality

Additionally, most phone call tracking systems have a feature which allows call recording and even call transcription. For instance, our favorite call tracking tool, WhatConverts, includes HIPAA compliant call recording at no additional cost, and also has optional features for call transcription and call analysis.

The call recording and transcription feature allows management to easily review calls for quality concerns. For example, let’s say you see quite a few leads coming in from your Google Ads campaign, but they are not converting into paying customers. Instead of assuming the lead quality is poor, you can analyze the call recordings and transcriptions to see if your sales and support teams are properly handling the calls.

The call recordings allow for opportunities to improve both your sales and customer support teams to convert more potential customers into paying customers, as well as improve your support quality for existing customers.

How Does Phone Call Tracking Work

Call tracking can get a bit tricky. Some advertising platforms will include a “call tracking feature.” For example, Google Ads has a dynamic number insertion (DNI) feature where, when implemented correctly, it will be able to track which phone calls came off your Google ads.

However, that does not help you understand what leads came from your other marketing channels like social media marketing, SEO, your Google Business Profile, etc. For example, Facebook has a different tracking pixel that can be used.

In essence, if you use each individual advertising platform’s tracking mechanism, you are left stringing system upon system together to piece together incomplete data on call tracking.

Instead, to get an accurate and holistic picture of your marketing channels, it’s much easier to use robust call tracking software that can integrate all the marketing channels within one system.

How to Get Call Tracking Numbers

While you can certainly buy additional numbers from your telephone provider, it’s not advisable to buy your own tracking numbers and manually string together reporting on how the numbers are being used. Instead, it’s far simpler to use robust call tracking software which allows you to get tracking numbers as needed based upon the campaigns you are running.

Using Robust Call Tracking Software

Getting setup on call tracking software can be simple or fairly complex depending on how your website is built, the extent of your offline campaigns, and the quality of call tracking software you select. Once you select your call tracking software, you will have configuration options that create a dynamic number pool (set of numbers) that will be dynamically inserted on your website. This pool of numbers is used to analyze and determine the marketing source of the phone call.

The average number of visitors you get to your website per day will determine how many tracking numbers you need in your tracking pool.

Depending on what call tracking software you use, they may also have functionalities for tracking form submissions, chats, and even e-commerce transactions.

PPC Campaign Call Tracking Integration

Using phone call tracking on PPC ads for platforms like Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram, and LinkedIn is a powerful way to analyze the conversion rate of a campaign. Most of those systems will allow you to even embed clickable phone numbers directly within the ads. This necessitates a separate call tracking number be configured for that specific ad campaign.

Additionally, advanced phone call tracking can allow you to see exactly which ad and even which keyword led to the phone call! This allows you both to see how your overall campaign is doing but also which ads and keywords are driving the highest number of phone call leads.

Google Business Profile Call Tracking

Local company’s Google Business Profiles are what populates the local map pack within search engine result pages (SERPs), as well as Google Maps. If you’ve used Google to find a local business like a plumber or even a restaurant, you may have clicked their phone number directly from the Google Business Profile listing. Advanced call tracking software can track those phone calls directly from the Google Business Profile (GBP) listing!

Offline Call Tracking

Additionally, you can implement additional tracking numbers to track calls that occur off of your website, whether that be off of a direct mail postcard, billboard you leased, Yelp listing, or even a paid sponsorship on another industry-related website.

All of those calls from offline sources can be tracked and aggregated into your online tracking dashboard.

How to Get Started with Phone Call Tracking Software

We have tested and investigated quite a few different systems over the years including native phone call tracking systems that are advertising platform specific, like Google Ads. Additionally, we’ve tested robust all-in-one tracking systems like CallTrackingMetrics, CallRail, and WhatConverts which can track conversions across all advertising platforms.

By far, our top recommendation for phone call tracking is WhatConverts. We use it here at Igniting Business and for our clients. WhatConverts is not necessarily the cheapest, but they are the most robust in terms of holistic tracking since their systems can natively track phone calls, form submissions, online chats, e-commerce transactions, and more. Additionally, their setup process is very streamlined, and their support is exceptionally responsive.

You can get a free trial of WhatConverts by visiting their website.

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