Call Tracking combines more than one inbound phone number with telecommunications technology that generates data on the caller and why they called, with data analysis to provide business intelligence on your inbound callers.
The current marketing climate requires your customers to have multiple ways to find you. It is crucial to have a multi-channel marketing campaign strategy to improve performance by mining complete and actionable data continually. By tracking call data and producing metrics that show actual results, you’ll inevitably improve the quality of your customer service.
Many of the world’s largest companies use call tracking to measure the effectiveness of their overall advertising campaigns. Marketing agencies are also using call tracking to prove their worth to their clients. All of these companies significantly understand the value of call data, using call tracking services to turn data into actionable metrics for business decisions.
Call Tracking: What Is It?
When a customer calls your company’s number, call tracking software will capture the information about that call, and save the data into a database referred to as a CDR or call detail record. The call tracking software will then process the CDR, your business rules, and produce standard and customized reports that are available on a dashboard for you to view. This gives you a good view of how your campaigns are working. This feature works across multiple platforms, either one toll-free or multiple unique numbers routed to the same inbound IVR application.
Multichannel Marketing
Call tracking allows you to prove the ROI of multi-channel campaigns, and justify the impact of marketing budgets. Multi-channel marketing could include an advertisement on a variety of channels like:
- Web – Website content or display ads
- Social – Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter ads
- Search – Search engine marketing and retargeting
- Print – Newspaper and magazine
- Broadcast – TV or radio ads
Data Collected By Call Tracking
When it comes to Call Tracking, there are specific data points collected as often or as frequently as you would like. Algorithms turn the call data into metrics that are shown on a dashboard, utilizing tables, graphs, and other visualizations. These metrics will provide fundamental keys to managing or planning effective strategies for marketing campaigns:
- Phone number the customer has called from (ANI)
- Phone number the customer called (DNIS)
- The geographical location of a caller, if available
- The time distribution of incoming calls
- The length of the call
- The disposition of the call
Customizing A Call Tracking Solution
The basic information tracked in a typical call contains substantial information. Combined with any specific tracking metrics of yours, a variety of customized reports can be produced. Call Tracking providers should be able to take the values you provide and deliver the analysis you need (i.e., MSA, or other territorial markers). Custom generated reports, crossed referenced with your custom values to create summaries for sales territories, or geographical maps of call distribution are also possible.
- Call disposition reports include missed calls, hang-ups, voicemail
- Peak Calling times: call summaries by time (hourly, daily)
- Details of repeat and unique callers
- Details of too long or too short calls
- Most effective ad campaigns
- Call recordings (can be downloaded or listened to online).
Gaining Insight Through Call Tracking
Call tracking can provide business intelligence for planning and growth. All this generated information can answer many questions and provide you with the knowledge you need to plan for the future successfully. Just a few examples:
Are there many calls from a specific area? Maybe it would be good for a business to build another location there.
Did the customer hang up too soon? Missing potential sales calls is money left on the table. Find out the reason, could it be a customer service issue? What are the busiest days and times? Do you need to increase or decrease or reschedule employee shifts?
Perfecting Your Marketing Campaigns
Analytic reporting can easily measure the effectiveness of ad placement, daypart, and creative versioning, be it TV, radio, online or out-of-home. The resulting business intelligence will enable a business to know when and where to invest ad revenue. Metrics include:
- ROI of marketing and ad dollars per campaign
- Leads received per ad campaign or promotion
- Most successful and least effective markets
- Campaigns driving the most conversions
The Biggest Benefit Of Call Tracking
According to AT&T, as much as 75% of all business calls are not completed on the first attempt. Recent statistics from Forbes magazine show that 80% of callers do not leave messages. Every missed call is a missed opportunity to get in touch with a customer and make a sale. While voicemail isn’t the safety net it once was, there is hope.
Call tracking can help inform a business on missed calls, and the originating number. This data offers an opportunity for a company to return a call and potentially win the otherwise missed business. Additionally, the reports can highlight a pattern with high amounts of missed calls. This information can be used to make changes, and be able to have an agent on call to provide better customer service.
The Biggest Misconception Of Call Tracking
Businesses considering Call Tracking often pose the question, “Doesn’t my main phone number have to change?” The answer is no. Your company can keep the phone number it currently has. To better track your marketing efforts, new numbers will be assigned and routed to your main number.
Static Numbers Versus Dynamic Numbers
Static tracking numbers: Static tracking numbers would be used directly on non-digital advertising. Dynamic number insertion is used online.Static Tracking Number. These numbers are assigned to track phone calls from traditional offline ad campaigns. Offline ad campaigns could be a radio ad, print media, or TV commercial. Unique static numbers are dedicated to each campaign, and even creatives, you want to track.
Dynamic Number Insertion: Online campaigns can take advantage of dynamic numbers. DNI involves using a bit of JavaScript on your website, or Google’s dynamic number insertion option for search ads. This code will generate a phone number that is dynamically inserted based on referring keyword, pay-per-click ad, search terms, or online or mobile banner ad. Then you can track which traffic sources generate phone calls and sales leads.
There’s More Than One Way To Track Calls
When it comes to Call Tracking, there’s more than one way to track calls within your business. The two most popular ways to track are known as:
One to One
This tracking will reuse the same phone number for all visitors from the same referral source; it will not track any unique visitor information from those callers. One to One tracking relates to a single activity type.
Pools
Pool tracking relates to multiple activity types. Using a pool of dynamic numbers, each website visitor receives a unique tracking number. Individual visitor information can then be tracked and identified, including what drove them to call. For example:
- Keyword Referral domain
- Landing page
- Google Click ID (GLID)
- Universal Analytics Client ID
Defining Customization In Call Tracking
If you only want to track phone calls for certain aspects of your campaigns, you can define customized rules for when call tracking numbers should deploy. Call tracking numbers can be integrated anywhere you would put a phone number in your marketing campaigns. Businesses often vary their call tracking numbers used by an ad, medium, or channel.
Most Popular Call Tracking Industries
Just like anything else, Call Tracking is favored in a variety of industries, mostly because prospects typically find these businesses through offline or online advertisements. Here are some of the most popular sectors for Call Tracking:
Real Estate
A good realtor will usually have a busy phone and have to juggle potential buyers. A great retail agent uses call tracking to improve. That’s because call detail reports allow an agent to focus on the number of calls they make and know which ones seemed like warmer leads. Some properties will require more phone numbers than others. Call tracking can assure that the property is appropriately advertised. It can also help agents to determine customer needs by narrowing down their choices, and what the caller is willing to invest in a property based on repeat caller information.
Insurance
Easily track the quality of your leads. When a customer’s information appears on your agent’s computer screen, your agent can suggest various types of insurance based on the caller’s geographic location. High-quality leads can get top priority, and go to those agents best qualified to handle the call. Your agency can elect to record incoming calls for quality assurance. With call recording, your managers can monitor the calls coming in. Accessing the quality of your calls provides a better understanding of which agents are top performers, and the ability to reward them.
Healthcare
Call tracking allows medical practices to determine how to advertise their facility to new customers and patients. However, a method would need to take into account how to do this while remaining HIPAA compliant. A HIPAA business associate agreement would guarantee that your patient’s data would be secure through data encryption, secure data transfers, and secure reporting. All this allows a practice to invest its advertising budget wisely while maintaining data security. With HIPAA compliant call tracking, your practice can provide better service and care, and have more time to focus on booking patient appointments.
Self-Storage
A typical Self-Storage facility often spends a majority of their budget doing search engine marketing or even TV commercials. But all of these self-storage facilities face the same issue: How do I narrow down the source of my leads? Without that data, a storage company may have some success with their current ad campaigns. Still, chances are they would be spending money without knowing whether their marketing efforts were practical. With a call tracking method in place, storage marketers can monitor and track inbound lead calls. The caller data is automatically populated on the POS screen in real-time.
Summary
Integrating call tracking into your campaigns is relatively straightforward. The service will allow for the most relevant and vital data to be captured with minimal capital expense.
Call tracking can also be integrated with several different technologies available by most call tracking service providers. Combining your call tracking with call recording, call routing, and click-to-call services can increase your call-related business intelligence. Contact us to learn more about how call tracking can leverage a new layer of business intelligence for your company.
