Call Tracking 101: Understanding What It Is and How It Works

Digital advertising remains among the best and most effective ways to attract high-intent, quality leads. But understanding the concept is just the first step to yielding the desired results. Without clearly set marketing goals and the right martech stack, analyzing the ad performance and identifying the top-performing channels is nearly impossible. That is precisely why the call tracking solution is essential for brands looking to ensure detailed attribution and successful campaign optimization.

While many providers offer similar call tracking systems, the features, customization options, and integration opportunities may vary. This detailed guide to call tracking will examine the principles of tracking telephone calls and describe the benefits of implementing a call tracking tool.

What Is the Call Tracking System For?

It’s no secret that call data speaks volumes. Call tracking systems allow brands to visualize all the captured data and highlight specific trends or outliers. That’s especially important for home services, education, insurance, healthcare, and finance industries.

Call tracking solutions are designed to obtain valuable data for marketing analytics. They offer businesses a variety of tools to track every inbound and outbound call, helping to capture the following information:

• Keywords used by potential clients to find the company
• Information about the ad group, campaign, web page, and channel on which the potential customer found the phone number
• Location of the prospects
• Number and name of the visitors
• Time of day and day of the call
• The sequence of the call (the software determines whether the customer is calling for the first time or has already contacted company representatives)
• Waiting time for the sales agent’s response
• Call results (depending on the set goals and what action is considered a conversion)
• Goals, issues, or requests, including which services consumers were interested in

What is Call Tracking?

In addition, the software for call tracking handles detailed recordings and transcription of phone conversations with clients. With this information at hand, brands can tailor a personalized approach to future interactions with prospects, which significantly increases the chance of conversion.

According to the research presented by Salesforce, the conversion rate can increase by 63% with a personalized approach to customer interactions. Ultimately, all the crucial metrics and indicators are available within the system thanks to unique trackable phone numbers for different campaigns and advertising channels.

How Does a Phone Call Tracking Work?

Modern software has advanced functionality that allows you to perform many settings and obtain valuable metrics. In general, there are 3 ways to use all these features.

Classic Option (Static) Call Tracking

This basic technology implies assigning a trackable phone number to each advertising channel. They can be installed for:

• Target pages
• Advertisements on television/radio
• Announcements
• Billboards
• SEO campaigns

Each brand can set separate numbers for only a few campaigns or all at once. It all depends on the goals and type of marketing strategy. When the visitor decides to call a static number, the software redirects it to the company’s main business line. In the process, all the essential call data is captured.

Static inbound call tracking is mainly suitable for advertisers and businesses focused on offline advertising.

Dynamic Call Tracking

It’s an advanced technology designed to establish a connection between website visits, offline ads, and calls. In a nutshell, different phone numbers are displayed to different visitors. In other words, two people who visited the site simultaneously will see and dial different numbers but reach the same business.

This way, brands can learn about the keywords, channels, ad campaigns — basically, every single interaction in the customer journey. When paired with other solutions like lead management or user behavior recording, marketers can activate an all-encompassing view into user behavior and lead traits and unpack what cases call conversions.

Ultimately, dynamic call tracking and call analytics provide an opportunity to review the history of customer interactions, identify trends, create speedy interactions with reps, and enhance the customer journey.

Combined Call Tracking Option

This technology provides a combination of dynamic and static call tracking capabilities. It is typically used when detailed information is required only for a couple of marketing channels, and general data is necessary for the rest of the campaigns.

In this case, you can install dynamic tracking for PPC landing pages, and use a static solution for other campaigns. 

Features of Call Tracking for Marketing

A wide range of functionality is available to businesses leveraging call tracking analytics. It allows them to obtain the required analytical data for various campaign formats and plug up leaks in their call funnels. Let’s look at several particularly important features.

Tips for Sales Agents (Call Whispering)

These are short messages that the sales agents access in real-time when they receive a call from a potential customer. Such prompts are available thanks to the automatic analysis of the prospect’s data.

The system recognizes which advertising channel is the call source and delivers this information to the sales rep or a call center employee. This way, they immediately understand what kind of request the client is making and what he is interested in. As a result, the interaction becomes more productive, and the agent can guarantee a personalized approach while increasing the chance of conversion.

Conversion Settings

That’s another useful feature of call tracking software. It allows brands to get more accurate reports and data. For instance, software users can specify which indicators should be considered a conversion. Suppose you can set the value of the settings so that only the calls lasting longer than 60 seconds will be considered a conversion. This feature allows marketers and sales reps to customize the settings and accomplish the mission.

Call Recordings & Their Analysis

The survey presented by Opus Research shows that the implementation of technologies that allow the analysis of conversations provides a return of 81%. It also applies to the call recording feature of inbound call tracking software. Utilizing it will ensure a deeper understanding of potential customers’ needs and help determine their expectations of the company’s product.

Why Use Call Tracking: The Benefits of Call Tracking for Business

The main value of the software is that it provides a basis for improving the marketing strategy and increasing the effectiveness of ad campaigns. That can be achieved thanks to the extended functionality to obtain important data about subscribers. As a result, the software users get quite a few benefits.

Another principal reason to use call tracking is to generate more high-intent leads. With call tracking software, you can incorporate filters and easily spot potential fraudulent leads through multiple call alerts. The filters allow you to block calls that don’t meet your criteria or have been flagged. 

Ultimately, implementing call tracking for business helps to highlight specific call details, perform detailed analysis of your marketing efforts, and ensure business agility.

Ability to Track Unanswered Calls

Call tracking software allows businesses to avoid a common issue that becomes an obstacle on the way to achieving high conversion rates – ignoring missed calls. Under normal conditions, agents cannot find out about prospects who called the company but couldn’t get an answer because all lines were busy.

Unfortunately, such calls are a lost cause, and the company ends up losing numerous potential clients. To avoid this, it’s crucial to identify and implement the best call tracking system. It will help you plug up leaks in your call funnel and significantly improve the caller journey.

Identifying the Most Effective Ad Campaign

Caller data that can be captured by call tracking software helps determine the return on investment of each advertising channel. That is the conversion rate and the total number of calls generated by active campaigns.

By comparing the numbers, you can determine which techniques and approaches work and which don’t yield the desired results. It also helps with the distribution of funds and campaign optimizations.

Personalization

It’s no secret that personalization significantly increases conversion rates. After all, every modern customer expects a brand to quickly deal with every request or issue and deliver the latest offers based on the customer’s interests. This way, companies foster loyalty, build communities, and increase brand recognition; call tracking can be one of the first steps on the road to business growth and brand affinity.

Quality Assurance

Gone are the days when call center agents had to manually process every inbound or outbound call. With the application of AI, contact centers can quickly determine what is and isn’t working for their agents. AI-powered call tracking systems can perform quality assurance and automatically detect when your agents fall off the talk track. While AI still has significant limitations, it makes this process almost unbiased and immune to human error.

Call Tracking Opens up New Possibilities

Despite the introduction of various communication methods by companies, phone calls haven’t lost their relevance. According to data provided by Zippia, 88% of visitors prefer to call and be able to speak to a live agent and get their questions answered on time.

Therefore, with call tracking software, you could get crucial customer data and numerous sales and marketing opportunities. After all, no company wants to operate at a loss or lack information about the weak points of ad campaigns. Implementing the right call tracking solution can help you foster business growth and get the data you need to make strategic marketing decisions.