Why Call Tracking and Call Analytics Matters
You’re aware of the importance of tracking your business website’s performance in terms of traffic, leads generated, search rankings, conversions, and so on. The same holds true for your other marketing channels like email and social media.
But that’s not it. You must track offline channels of conversations and conversions as well — we’re talking about the good ol’ phone calls. Because, while you may find it hard to believe, 65% of Fortune 500 companies say phone calls are their highest quality lead source.
What’s more, according to Google, 61% of mobile searchers state that being able to call via click-to-call is most important in the purchase phase of the shopping process. 70% of mobile searchers have used click-to-call to connect with a business directly from the search engine results page, and 57% of those people called because they wanted to talk to a real person.
And so, your prospects are likely to pick up the phone and call your business instead of filling out website forms. This means you can’t afford to overlook the importance of call tracking analytics.
So what is call tracking, exactly?
In essence, it is a system that enables you to track marketing activities that drive calls to your business.
Call tracking solutions dynamically generate unique phone numbers for each of your marketing channels — such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or your local business listing — to track the success of these campaigns where one of the main calls to action (CTA) is, well, to call your business.
The calls are forwarded to your main business number and with the help of that unique tracking number, you can measure the volume and quality of those inbound calls, and also record calls.
Likewise, call tracking analytics allows you to generate useful reports to analyze and improve your campaigns based on some essential call tracking metrics.
With the definitions clear, here are five key reasons why call tracking and analytics are crucial to your business.
Improve marketing ROI
A call tracking system is a great attribution tool that helps you understand which ad groups, keywords, or campaigns drive the best-quality leads and sales.
Yes, with Google Ads and Analytics, you can track and attribute online conversions. But what about the cases when a prospect decides to call you instead of filling out an online form?
With campaign-level call tracking, you get a more comprehensive picture of each campaign’s success, including offline campaigns.
That is, it provides a reliable way to track your offline marketing campaigns, so you can place tracking numbers in billboards, flyers, etc. to correctly track the success of your efforts and have a solid idea as to which campaigns are yielding the highest ROI for your business.
You can see exactly how your customers are finding you, and which campaigns are responsible. With call tracking, you can compare the cost of your marketing investments — online, print, etc. —and then determine which of those investments are performing best.
If you’re running Google Ads, call tracking allows you to see leads and sales generated at the keyword level. This way you can redistribute your budget to keywords that drive more clicks customers to click and filter out the ones that don’t perform well, thus reducing budget waste and improving ROI.
Understand the customer journey
Phone calls are an important part of the customer journey. But accurately mapping the customer journey is tricky as you have to bridge the gap between offline and online conversations.
Plus, knowing only the online aspect of your customer journey can lead to poor marketing decisions.
With call tracking, you can tie inbound and outbound phone calls to each stage of the buyer’s journey. And by integrating call tracking and analytics with your CRM, you can capture, store, and analyze all the offline conversations with customers that occur at each stage of the funnel, thus gaining a better understanding of the customer journey.
Boost customer experience
Customer experience essentially consists of every single interaction a customer has with your business, including phone calls.
With 86% of buyers willing to pay more for a great customer experience, an outstanding customer experience is pivotal to stay ahead of the game.
Call tracking plays a crucial role in boosting the customer experience. With it, you can map the path a prospect followed prior to calling your business, and based on the caller data (name, location, call history, etc.), your team can tailor their language and offer a highly personalized experience over the phone.
Also, call tracking software provides you with call recordings and transcriptions of the calls to review your agents’ conversations with prospects. Then, you can find areas of improvement and train your team more effectively. You can also evaluate the efficacy of the call scripts you use so as to improve the on-call customer experience and thus, your conversion rate.
Demonstrate value to clients
In particular, if you’re a marketing agency, your number one priority is to showcase the value of your work to clients.
This isn’t always a straightforward task, but call tracking lends a helping hand by quantifying the contribution of inbound calls towards your clients’ businesses. Without call tracking, it may seem your campaigns are underperforming, which is not the case.
For instance, if you’re running a Google Ads campaign for an eCommerce client. Prospects click on your well-crafted ads and land on the client’s product page.
It could happen that many convert by clicking on the “Add to Cart” button, but a good chunk of visitors pick up the phone and talk to a salesperson. They close the browser window and may convert over the phone. In this case, Google Analytics will record a bounce, but in reality, your ad generated qualified leads that completed their purchase (or shared their contact details) on a call.
So, call tracking for agencies allows you to receive due credit for the traffic, leads, and revenue you generate for your clients via inbound calls from the campaigns you create.
Eradicate unanswered calls
When a prospect gets in touch with your business over the phone, they want answers to their questions without any delay.
Now, failed calls due to a busy phone line or calls placed outside business hours can not only let them down but also drive them to your competitors.
Your best bet to make up for such a poor experience is to call customers back at the earliest. For that, you need a call tracking system, as it sends real-time notifications (voicemail or email) for every lost call so that your agents can respond ASAP.
Furthermore, call analytics reports help reveal the peak hours and days of activity, thus enabling your business to better organize shifts to work at full capacity during those time slots. In doing so, unanswered calls would be minimized or even eliminated.
Final Thoughts
Nearly 9 out of 10 people say their biggest gripe is not getting a human on the phone when they call for customer service. Plus, inbound calls are 10-15 times more likely to convert to revenue than web leads and form completions.
And if your business is local, know that 76% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit the business within 24 hours and 28% of those searches result in a purchase.
All this means that without a doubt, call tracking and analytics are not a mere nice-to-have but rather a must-have for businesses (and agencies) big and small.
Simply put, call tracking and analytics helps you and your marketing team reveal patterns from phone interactions that you can leverage to optimize customer acquisition, enhance customer experience, and ultimately drive revenue growth.
