10 Essential Call Tracking Metrics You Must Monitor for Your Business

December 10, 2020

For your online marketing efforts, you have plenty of ways to track your prospects’ behavior on your website. You can use heat maps, click tracking, multi-channel attribution, and so on.

However, around 65% of customers prefer to contact businesses by phone calls, while only 24% prefer to fill out a web form. That is, a massive chunk of your leads come from phone calls, and these leads are worth up to ten times more than inbound form leads in terms of revenue.

So while monitoring your online traffic and data is essential, in order to get a complete picture of your marketing efforts (online and offline), allocation of resources to the right channels, and ensure a continually growing ROI, you must combine data from offline phone call conversions and web-based conversion using our comprehensive call tracking service.

That’s where call tracking comes in. How does call tracking work? In essence, call tracking generates unique phone numbers for each of your marketing channels — such as Google Ads or your local business listing — to track the effectiveness of these campaigns where the primary call to action is to call the business.

The calls are forwarded to your main business number, and with the help of that unique tracking number, you’re able to measure the quality of those inbound calls and generate detailed reports to improve your campaigns.

For that, you need to understand and monitor some essential call tracking metrics that give you the best insights into your overall performance. When we track calls, we essentially provide you with digital marketing advice in a data-driven way.

In this post, let’s take a look at all those metrics.

Metric #1: Call Source

If you wish to understand which campaigns bring in the most calls, it’s vital to track the referral source for each inbound call.

For offline marketing campaigns, tracking the call source is straightforward as you can provide unique phone numbers to each campaign: printing one phone number directly on a newspaper ad, another one on a billboard ad, and so on — even if they’re all transferred to the same place.

But for digital campaigns, you can’t track the source of the call without a call tracking system. With dynamic call tracking, aka dynamic number insertion, you can generate as many phone numbers as you need to display on your website, landing pages, social media, PPC ads, email newsletters, and what have you.

You can then track phone call referral sources to individual channels and get an idea of how different campaigns are performing with similar messaging. Furthermore, with dynamic number insertion, you can automatically show only local numbers associated with a prospect’s location. You can also recycle unused numbers for future campaigns.

When you know which campaigns or ads drive the most calls, you’re in a better position to decide where to double down your budget and where to slow down your efforts.

Metric #2: Call Volume

If you’re striving to increase your inbound phone calls, call volume is one of the most important metrics you need to monitor.

You can recognize useful call patterns (daily, weekly, monthly) with detailed call volume reports. Moreover, call volume data enables attribution as well, and you can see which ads drive the most calls while providing insights for a better understanding of your ROI.

With a call tracking service, you can easily tally the calls you miss when you’re busy or out of the office and contextualize this volume by tracking other data points to determine what other factors might affect call volume — both overall and in particular times of the day.

Call volume is also a great metric to track the success of your local SEO or PPC updates. For instance, if you’ve recently optimized your Google My Business listing with new photos and posts, Google call tracking software helps you determine the change in the number of inbound calls after you’ve optimized your local search listing.

If you find the changes were successful in terms of a higher call volume, you have a better idea of how to tweak your listing further to drive even more calls.

Metric #3: Call Duration

Call length is an important call tracking metric you need to keep an eye on. Having a high call volume is great, but not all calls have equal value. To get a sense of how valuable each inbound call is, you must monitor your call duration.

Logic dictates that a longer call duration implies a higher quality lead. If someone spends a lot of time talking to your business, they likely have a high purchase intent or interest in learning about your offerings. Some phone calls yield better leads than others, and better leads indicate sufficient marketing efforts.

So, call duration data shows which campaigns and ads are resulting in longer and more meaningful conversations and helps filter out high-quality leads. You can set a minimum call length threshold (one minute or five, depending on your business) to better qualify callers as leads.

Metric #4: Call Type

It also helps to know what types of calls are being placed by your prospects — whether the call was made via a mobile click-to-call button, your Google My Business listing, a Google forwarding number manually entered, etc.

Additionally, it’s a good idea to segment your inbound calls according to the marketing channel so you’ll get a broader view of the effectiveness of the different areas of your marketing efforts.

For instance, if your search ad campaigns are driving an astounding number of inbound calls but your social media ads aren’t delivering, this may hint that your social media marketing strategy needs some fixing.

You can use call tagging to segment and report calls by type. This labeling enables you to sort calls into categories and easily identify and filter various call types during a later review. So, for example, with tags like “customer service issue” or “product inquiry,” it becomes easy to categorize and organize your calls in a way that makes sense for your team.

If you are receiving a multitude of inbound calls daily, it may be challenging to keep track of every call conversion event. Fortunately, our tracking services also provide you with call recordings so that you can go back and reevaluate the conversion information.

Metric #5: Date and Time

Knowing when you’re receiving the most calls and the calls with the most conversions is extremely valuable to optimize your:

• Customer-facing team’s availability and response times

• Bidding strategy and spending on PPC and social media ad campaigns

For instance, if you’re running a retail clothing business, you may notice low call volume and duration during working hours on weekdays. However, you may also note that your best calls come during evenings and weekends.

While this information may seem obvious, date and time information can reveal less obvious patterns, such as longer conversation calls tending to happen on late Friday afternoons.

Armed with this knowledge, it makes sense to boost your PPC spending in that particular time frame and ensure your staff is available to answer phone calls during these hours.

That is, with the date and time data, you can adjust your bids and waste spending on hours where you’re least likely to receive inquiries. In the same vein, you can also optimize the locations where your ads are showing. If you know a particular locality consistently brings in high-converting phone leads, you can increase your bid for that region.

Metric #6: Percentage of First-Time Callers

As the name suggests, a first-time caller is someone who has never called your business before. Therefore, if you wish to continue growing your customer base and form new customer relationships, monitoring your percentage of first-time callers is key.

This is an important metric to track as it represents the number of potential new customers you can garner over a defined period of time.

So, consider segmenting your first-time caller data from repeat callers. Google Analytics call tracking integrations can also let you parse out the callers’ source and session details for more in-depth analysis.

By separating first-time callers from repeat ones, you can compare performance metrics such as call duration, referral source, and other metrics that might reveal different patterns among first-time callers that you can leverage to improve their engagement, conversion rates, and overall marketing ROI.

Besides, you can also analyze their on-site behavior to see which web page they visited right before calling you so you can optimize the pages that aren’t driving any web leads.

Metric #7: Keyword Performance

The inbound calls that are driven by paid ads on search engines or social media, or even organic Google searches, can all be tied to the keywords used by your audience.

By attributing calls to keywords, you can better understand the performance of your target keywords and also discover new keywords that have the potential to bring in more leads.

Also, you may have an expensive keyword that doesn’t seem to be bringing in the expected amount of leads, but when you attribute it to inbound calls, you’ll realize that it is, in fact, generating the desired amount of leads.

Simply put, monitoring your keyword performance gives you greater accuracy in your campaign reports and can help you fine-tune your target keyword list based on what’s most effective for driving inbound calls.

Metric #8: Landing Page Performance

Landing pages are dedicated web pages that convince your visitors to opt-in for an offer, such as download a free resource or sign up for a free trial, by filling out a short form, thereby converting them into leads.

A landing page can also be meant for convincing visitors to make an immediate purchase or get in touch with the business via phone, form, or chat.

Now, without website call tracking, your landing page conversion rate may appear much lower than it really is. If you only capture data about the number of forms filled and chat conversations, you are creating blind spots in your marketing attribution and downplaying your landing page’s performance.

In other words, if you don’t track phone calls resulting from a landing page visit, you can’t correctly credit the landing page and the marketing campaign that drove the landing page referral in the first place.

Call tracking may actually reveal that the landing page generates a significant number of quality leads and conversions via phone calls.

So, make sure to track your landing page performance using a web-based call tracking software and figure out which landing pages generate the most calls, qualified leads, and customers. Website call metrics is a valuable tool in phone call conversion tracking.

Metric #9: Visitor to Call Ratio

You may notice that a marketing channel seemingly produces a lower than average website visitor traffic but has a relatively higher cost per visitor. At first, this looks like a clear sign that the channel isn’t effective and your budget is spent better elsewhere.

But what if the percentage of calls that channel produces is twice or thrice that of other channels? As you know, phone leads are much more likely to convert than a website visitor.

And so, monitoring your visitor-to-call ratio is essential as it helps identify marketing channels that are delivering high-quality inbound phone leads.

Metric #10: Conversions

The most pivotal metric of them all, tracking conversions will help you determine which type of leads — phone-based or web-based — result in the most profitable kinds of customers.

A phone call may not be your business’s first interaction with a customer. Especially if your business is based online — such as SaaS or B2B eCommerce — you know how prospects tend to go through your website, social media channels, and review platforms before deciding to pick up the phone.

So, take a look at your marketing campaigns — including ads, keywords, landing pages, call to action on blog posts, social media chats, etc. — to determine the various interactions that occurred prior to the inbound call.

An enterprise call tracking solution enables you to capture both website and call metrics, so you can monitor the prospect’s journey that led up to the call.

This way, you can see which marketing techniques work best for your business in terms of driving prospects down the sales funnel.

For example, if it’s a PPC advertising campaign, a conversion may happen within minutes of an inbound call or after a month of hesitation. For the latter, you can track your conversion back to that first click and know your true ROI on that PPC campaign investment.

How The Call Conversion Tracking Feature In Google Ads Works

What Is The Call Conversion Tracking Feature Of Google Ads?

Suppose you use a mobile phone to search for something on Google. The services that appear likely have a phone number, and if you click on this phone number, you are connected directly to the advertiser.

But what if the search result takes you to the website, and the site displays a different phone number than the one you found before?

Google Ads provides a call conversion tracking code for the website that dynamically changes this phone number to mimic whatever was displayed in the ads.

A paid Google Ads account does this with the help of Google Tag Manager.

Our Google Ads Integration Setup

Google Ads integration requires enabling Google Analytics and setting up a goal for phone calls. A number pool tracker using our dynamic number insertion is also necessary.

The following steps outline how you can feed call data into your Google Ads account to start analyzing call patterns and executing conversion tracking:

1. Follow our setup guide for Google Analytics and Phone Call Goal setup.

2. Go to Tools in your Google ads account and select Conversions.

3. When you reach the conversions page in Google Ads, select Google Analytics.

4. You will see a table of goals. Select the Phone Call goal.

5. Configure the goal conversion import settings and select Import Goals.

6. Your Google Ads account should now reflect the imported goals of your Google Analytics account. Note: it may take a couple of hours for these goals to appear.

Essentially, Google Ads click IDs are sent to a conversion event in Google Analytics before being imported into Google Ads.

Over to You

There is a myriad of reasons why your business should invest in phone call tracking software.

From improving customer service with call recording and determining which keywords are driving the most valuable calls to measuring and boosting the success of your paid advertising efforts, call tracking technology gives you all the data to tie your offline marketing with digital to get a comprehensive view of your efforts.

Using call tracking software, you can easily monitor the essential metrics outlined above to fully capitalize on the power of call tracking and make the most of your marketing budget.

You can also integrate your business’s CRM with call tracking, as it’ll help you on your quest to build stronger customer relationships.