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Call Tracking – Why it Can Improve Your Performance Reporting

How do you measure your marketing successes? This isn’t a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely interested to know what it is that you’re striving to achieve. Online conversions might look good on paper, but unless these successes correlate with money coming in, and an increase in business, then they’re not going to be much good to you in the long run. That’s because for most industries outside of basic e-commerce, the vast majority of leads and sales are generated via the telephone.

So to put it another way: Are you sure that you’re measuring your online marketing successes accurately? Because if not then maybe call tracking is the answer.

What is Call Tracking?

At its most basic level, call tracking involves issuing potential customers with a dynamic telephone number, in order to determine which marketing methods and advertising campaigns are generating phone calls, and which are not. And in doing so, provides marketers with the relevant data needed to optimize their efforts for the better.

Marketing to procure leads is always going to be costly, especially when running paid traffic via the likes of Google AdWords and Bing Ads. That’s why it’s so important that marketers are able to distinguish which forms of advertising (ad banners/landing pages/Google listings, etc) are generating those leads and sales, which require improvement, and which ones need to be dropped altogether. This is the only way to maximize ROI.

How Call Tracking Works

Instead of being served with a regular contact telephone number, customers arriving at a landing page, or clicking an ad, are issued with an individual telephone number – also known as a dynamic tracking number – which is supplied via a call tracking platform.

Image: Example of a landing page that has been integrated with a dynamic tracking number for the customer to call (source. Iamalpdesigner)

These dynamic tracking numbers are registered every time they are displayed (just like every landing page or ad being viewed is registered) and is tracked as a ‘conversion’ when the number is dialled.

From this data, marketers are able to determine which landing page variations yield the better conversion rate, which ads have the greatest impact – as well as determining which keywords drove the best performing traffic – and allows businesses to reinvest towards features of advertisement that produce the best return.

But like I said, determining which marketing methods are generating leads and sales is just a very basic example of what call tracking can do.

Using Call Tracking to Improve Performance Reporting

Hopefully by now you’ve begun to grasp how call tracking can help measure your online marketing successes more accurately. But let’s take a moment to delve a little deeper.

It’s important to recognize that many businesses value in-store visits and phone calls over online leads and conversions. Using landing pages and other forms of advertisement to market online may be performing well, but online conversion is not a true measure of success to these kinds of businesses.

For example, click through landing pages and data capture forms are a great way of registering online interest in your business. But unless these leads are followed up and converted into ‘real sales’ that generate income, then they’re not an accurate measure of success. Enabling call tracking ensures that only the leads that equate to a sale – or an action of equal value, as defined by the business – is registered as a conversion. Companies are then able to make decisions based on the actual revenue that is generated through specific marketing efforts, rather than simply looking at the number of potential leads.

What Does This Mean For Me?

When it comes to measuring success, no two businesses are alike. What may be a good result for some won’t always be the same for others. And metrics of success certainly don’t fall exclusively into the categories of ‘leads’ or ‘sales’ – it’s far more complicated than that.

Call tracking allows you to set your own metrics that are of value to YOUR business. So, if you wish, you can choose to only track calls of a specific duration as a conversion. This could be anything from a few seconds to an entire consultation – whatever the truest representation of a ‘sale’ to your business might be.

Post Call IVR, another feature of call tracking, takes this notion even further and allows call-handlers to rate the value of a conversion based on the nature of the call. This is an effective way of measuring the number of promising leads, whilst at the same time discounting a lead that doesn’t qualify. Thereby improving the accuracy of your performance reporting.

The advantage of customizable benchmarks is it allows you to set your own levels of success and optimize accordingly, such as strengthening the quality of your ads and landing pages which drove those calls in the first place. Whatever it is you can identify that will help improve leads and sales generation.

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Article image source, techwyse