In today’s digital marketing landscape, it’s vital to remember that the basics still matter. Many of the world’s most successful companies rely on inbound phone calls for lead generation and conversion. Call tracking is one of the most underutilized marketing tools, especially in small and medium-sized businesses.
Let’s examine call tracking, define it, and consider how it might fit into your strategy to drive engagement and generate growth.
What is Call Tracking?
Call tracking is a broad term that describes any activity where incoming calls are monitored and analyzed to generate marketing insights. In its simplest form, you would have a phone number assigned to your campaign, with analytics attached to your touchpoints to determine what is driving phone calls.
In the context of digital marketing, call tracking goes further. Depending on how you implement call tracking, you could identify calls by source, duration, and even keywords that led to them.
Why Should Your Brand Care About Call Tracking?
With digital marketing becoming increasingly competitive, knowing what works and why is crucial. Tracking phone calls gives you insights and is essential for marketing professionals and businesses.
- Tracking brings context with attribution. You can determine where leads and sales came from, whether this is campaigns, specific channels, or keywords. The insights help you allocate budgets efficiently.
- You gain better customer insights. Analyzing call traffic and the content of calls can help you identify customer preferences, needs, pain points, and behaviors. You can take this data to refine your marketing approach and improve customer experiences.
- Sometimes, it feels like analytics exist in a bubble. How does your website traffic relate to sales? How can you connect the data if you generate leads online but do the rest on the phone or in person? Call tracking is one way to identify which campaigns drive sales and interactions. It’s a bridge between your digital efforts and your on-the-ground sales work.
- Call tracking ultimately increases conversion rates by helping you identify quality lead sources.
Much of marketing is rooted in optimization. Call tracking is another tool to optimize your marketing efforts and ensure you get actionable results.
How do You Integrate Call Tracking into a Website?
Various solutions exist to implement call tracking, the best of which are straightforward. Popular tools like Google Analytics have call-tracking features built into the platform.
Tracking calls is highly configurable, but many businesses rely on a marketing partner to configure and manage the tracking software.
A basic implementation would be integrating call tracking into analytics software linked to a specific phone number. Some businesses use individual phone numbers for unique campaigns, and some go to extreme granularity to have unique numbers for each ad. The right solution depends on factors like business size, budget, geographic areas served, and the scope of your online presence.
A cost-efficient solution would combine a specific phone number, website call buttons, and tracking in your analytics software to see call origins driven by online sources.
Using a VOIP service with geo-targeted phone numbers for individual campaign elements can give you more details. For example, analytics could track unique phone numbers for your website, your PPC ad campaigns, and a local billboard advertisement. Viewing call quantity and duration from each source could indicate where your customers are coming from, ensuring you optimize and refine your marketing efforts.
Call tracking’s potential ranges from simply tracking the number of calls to identifying where they come from and whether or not they drive sales. This kind of scalability keeps call tracking competitive with other marketing tools.
What Changes When You Start Tracking Calls?
Tracking calls could have an immediate impact depending on your brand’s size and typical call volumes.
- You can more efficiently allocate resources with clear insights into which campaigns and strategies drive engagement.
- You can enhance customer activity by identifying the specific ads and messages that resonate with your audience.
- Lead quality improves when you know where conversions come from.
Leveraging the Best Technologies to Grow Your Brand
Understanding the concept of call tracking is simple. Implementing it into your strategy might require more research, planning, and organization. Working with an experienced digital marketing partner can make tools like call tracking more readily available. With an efficient marketing partner, you could get cost-effective solutions to do more than call tracking, bringing all your digital marketing efforts together under an easy-to-manage service.
Captive Web Media offers innovative digital strategies to expand your reach and grow your brand presence. We can integrate various strategies and campaigns into a single cost-efficient service. We are passionate about helping brands grow and reach their potential. Talk to us and learn more about tracking your calls and other options to market your business. We give you the freedom to focus on what you’re best at while we refine your digital efforts to maximize your budget.
