Website Call Tracking For Advertising and Marketing

Does Your Marketing & Advertising Drive Phone Calls?

 

You know people call your business.  Now if only you know how they found your phone number.  If you rely on inbound phone calls for a large portion of your sales, website call tracking can help you determine the profitability of your marketing and advertising efforts.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending time, effort, and money on marketing and advertising and not knowing if it worked. The good news is that call tracking is now affordable and easy to implement for small businesses.  We are going to discuss the benefits, costs, and how to implement call tracking.

Some of the benefits of using call tracking software for your website include the ability to track the source of the call.  Did the call come from a search on Google, and ad on Facebook, or a direct mail piece? How long did the call last from each of these sources?  Did your salesperson answer the call properly? Does the length of call or close rate vary by salesperson or offer?

What is Website Call Tracking Software?

Website call tracking software allows you to put a small snippet of code on your website that dynamically replaces the phone number shown on your website with another phone number that is then tracked by the phone call tracking software company.  This phone number has the available information attached to it at the time the call is made.  

This information usually includes the referral source that sent the user that made the call, the time of the call, and the caller id (if available).  Often the software provider will also include call recording in the service. Sometimes additional information is available about the call itself such as geographic location of the caller, start and end time of the call, and the specific number the user called.

Why is Website Call Tracking Important?

By tracking the calls made from your website  you will be able to:

• Evaluate marketing channels to determine which are generating the most phone leads for your business.
• Create and use unique phone numbers for each advertising and marketing effort to ensure leads are credited to the correct source.
• Evaluate all your individual marketing projects and programs that drive phone calls to see if they are profitable.
• Incorporate call data in your Analytics to better understand how calls affect your overall sales.
• Improve conversion optimization & page performance.  You will be able to see which pages on your website drive the most calls and take action to improve those that underperform.
• Integrate call data into sales efforts.  Sales managers will be able to see where each salesperson’s leads came from and develop strategies based on the results.

A Couple of Examples of Website Call Tracking Implementation

Case 1: One of our clients, a business to business services company, asked us to implement call tracking in order to evaluate the ROI of their marketing spend.  Before implementation, we could see an increase in the number of calls during various advertising campaigns but it was difficult to determine which campaigns had caused the increase in calls.  Additionally we received feedback from some of the salespeople that many of the leads they were receiving when the call volume increased were not good.

Results:

The call tracking implementation only took a few days of coordination with their website development team.  After implementing the call tracking we were able to see which campaigns, keywords, and referral sources were generating calls. Based on the call data we were also able to help the client develop a call inquiry quality metric which helped us focus on the sources of calls that were most likely to become sales.  In the end we were able to achieve a much lower cost per sale by focusing on the sources that produced the highest quality calls.

Case 2: This client sells expensive, complicated products to consumers.  Most of their sales required customization which involved a phone call.  Because of the large call volume and the need to have a fairly large call center it was difficult for the company to get accurate feedback from its staff about the calls being received.  They had tried to get the call center staff to enter the source of the call in their CRM but found staff compliance was very inconsistent. We implemented a call tracking program across their websites.

Results:

Despite multiple websites built on multiple content management systems we were able to implement the call tracking software in a few days.  Within months we were able to breakdown all the inquiries and sales by marketing channel. We were further able to segment the sales by product type and lead source.  This allowed us to differentiate specials and offers to cater to specific segments that found the company on different channels. We achieved a substantial improvement in ROI by focusing more targeted offers optimized for the specific buyer interests from each source.

Cost of Website Call Tracking Software

The cost of call tracking software can be confusing because of the different methods the call tracking software companies use to price.  Small businesses with limited call volume can expect to pay around $30 per month for a solution that will meet their needs. If your business has a lot of call volume, uses a lot of minutes, or has other special needs the costs may increase from their.

Important Questions When Pricing Call Tracking Software:

• How many minutes included in the plan?
• How many Phone Numbers are included?
• Are toll free numbers included?
• Are local numbers included?
• Are text messages included?

Summary

Potential customers still use the phone to call about products and services.  For some companies the best leads are calls. Tracking phone calls generated by your website helps close the gap in measurement that occurs for companies that depend on inbound calls for sales.  One way you can ensure you know how well your marketing dollars are being spent my investing in website phone call tracking software.

If you would like more information on how we can help you implement call tracking software please contact us.