How Does Call Tracking Work and What Is It?
If you’ve never heard of call tracking software, you might assume that it’s only used by contact centers to keep agents on-script or by helicopter parents to keep an eye on their children who are acting up. Call tracking may be used by your contact center to track call quality, but it differs from the technology that marketers use to assign call credit and collect data for campaign optimization. You won’t find anything tasty there, and I’m rather certain that teenagers don’t use phones to call their buddies. Perhaps look at Snapchat or something.
Now that we’ve established a common understanding, let’s explore call tracking software and how it benefits marketers.
Call tracking software: What is it?
Contact monitoring software enables marketers to collect data from consumer phone calls that may be used to demonstrate precisely what marketing strategy or campaign led to the call and what the call’s outcome was. For instance, if you call a company that uses call tracking, they will be able to determine which advertisements, web pages, and even keywords influenced your decision to call.
Additionally, while you’re on the phone, conversational analytics may be used to analyze the language used to determine whether you made a purchase, requested a quote, scheduled an appointment, or otherwise completed a “conversion” as marketers like to refer to it. In order to increase the number of high-value customers calling you, you can use the data to attribute marketing efforts and optimize your commercials, websites, social media posts, and other forms of promotion.
Since your data trail stops when potential consumers pick up the phone, without call monitoring it is hard to demonstrate the return on investment of your marketing campaigns that generate sales calls.
What Is the Process of Call Tracking Software?
Marketers can link clients’ digital trips to phone calls using cloud-based call tracking software by collecting online data via distinct, trackable phone numbers. A website tag allows for call tracking and analytics. The tag is a little piece of JavaScript code that is added to your website and substitutes regular, static phone numbers with trackable, dynamic phone numbers that are particular to each site visitor. These changing numbers serve as a special identification for a user’s web session.
Tag manages dynamic phone numbers in addition to collecting other information like UTM source, media, paid search term, and Google ClickID. The browser cookie is used to collect additional information about the consumer journey, such as page visits and distinctive customer IDs. You can precisely identify the marketing strategies that are generating your high-value phone calls with the help of this data.
A call is forwarded through the platform to a call center, a local agent, or any other location when someone dials a phone number. This makes it possible to combine the digital data and link the past online behavior of the callers to the phone call. The caller’s experience is not interrupted and this happens almost immediately.
Why Do I Need to Track My Calls?
According to Forrester, 84% of marketers think phone calls have greater conversion rates and higher average order values (AOV) than other types of engagement. Calls are frequently the most important conversions marketers drive. You’re only getting a partial view of your ROI if you’re not keeping track of the phone calls that your marketing generates.
You may determine which digital ads, keywords, and webpages are most successful at generating phone calls to your company by using call tracking. Additionally, you can observe how many of those phone conversations resulted in conversions and excellent prospects. With complete end-to-end attribution for your campaigns, you can increase revenue by making wiser optimization choices.
How Does Call Tracking Help Marketers?
By combining online and offline data sources, marketers most typically utilize call monitoring to improve the efficacy of paid search and other digital marketing initiatives, customize the caller experience, and improve the entire customer journey. Reduced cost-per-click (CPC) on sponsored search, decreased cost-per-acquisition (CPA), and increased return on ad spend are the main advantages that many call tracking users observe (ROAS).
The advantages of inbound call monitoring
- Analyze the whole return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts.
- Receive credit for all phone call conversions that your marketing generates.
- Boost media spending to generate higher-quality leads.
- Spend less on unnecessary advertising.
- Retarget callers based on the content of their phone conversations by enhancing caller profiles with conversation data.
- To make your marketing pitch stronger, incorporate common terms from discussions.
- By monitoring and enhancing sales representative performance, you may increase call conversion rates.
- Integrate conversation intelligence data with the technology you already use.
Which Sectors Need a Call Tracking Solution?
A call tracking solution should be used by every industry that relies on inbound calls to bring in clients. They can then optimize in accordance with their understanding of the marketing initiatives that are producing the greatest value.
- automobiles,
- health care,
- home services,
- finances,
- franchising,
- insurance,
- travel,
- telecommunications,
- real estate,
- more are examples.
How to Combine Call Tracking Data from Clicks and Calls
You must collect data for each distinct customer in order to acquire the closed-loop attribution you need to enhance your digital marketing. This data is contained in a caller profile, which allows marketers to keep a true treasure trove of pertinent information. These facts come in a variety of formats:
- Data about the customer journey, such as website visits and ad exposure (you might think of this as cookie or campaign data).
- first-party information that may be retrieved from a marketer’s CRM, such as customer records.
- unbiased demographic information.
- Call information that covers common parameters like call duration, time of day, caller area code, and more
- Conversational analytics and other AI-based solutions that generate conversational data.
You now have the foundation to determine which marketing initiatives are driving the most calls and can start using this information by combining these datasets into a detailed caller profile and correlating it to the phone conversation.
How to Use Call Tracking to Improve Paid Search
Optimizing paid search is one of the main applications of call tracking. We’ll use Google Ads as an example because every single marketing professional now on the planet has used or is using it.
You may treat this call data exactly how you would ordinarily approach digital data because Google Ads reports phone conversions in a manner similar to how it reports online conversions.
- Take a look at which advertising, ad groups, and keywords are influencing each kind of call outcome.
- To determine the return on advertising investment, measure call revenue.
- By implementing automatic bidding algorithms, use conversions to maximize keyword spending.
Call tracking software enhancing the caller experience
It appears that the call center needs to solve the issue of improving the call experience. However, conversion rates decrease and your marketing efforts become less successful when the caller (whom you paid to call with your marketing expenditures) has a bad experience. which means that it is also your concern. You may customise the call experience and boost your conversion rates with the aid of call tracking and analytics systems.
Insights about a caller, such as their prior engagement history and the keyword and ad campaign that prompted the call, can be retrieved in real time by the call center. Calls can be automatically routed and filtered using this data in order to connect callers with the department or person who can best assist them without having to go through the phone tree.
Call center representatives can work with the customer to close the sale more successfully and efficiently if they have this knowledge. A consumer can be sent straight to an agent who is aware of the items they have in their basket and the reason they are calling, for instance, if they have an item in their shopping cart and call before checking out.
For instance, DISH Network discovered that many of its online customers were leaving their shopping carts empty when prompted to enter sensitive data like social security numbers. It used calltracking to seamlessly route cart abandoners to a call center experience that was especially suited to their needs in order to ensure that it could convert these clients.
Features of call tracking that enhance customer satisfaction
- Personalize marketing campaigns better.
- Using information about digital intent, intelligently direct callers to the best agent.
- Create cloud IVRs in a matter of minutes without IT support.
- Mark websites that are contributing to online desertion.
- Deepen your understanding of consumer demands and evolving expectations.
- Utilize AI to evaluate sales representative performance automatically and enhance coaching.
- Prioritize your follow-ups based on which missed calls represent high-value sales chances.
What Questions Should I Ask Call Tracking Providers When I’m Evaluating Them?
Numerous businesses provide simple, uncomplicated phone tracking options. To choose the vendor who will really bring the most value, you should go a little further. Here are some crucial inquiries to put to phone tracking companies:
- Does the call tracking system offer attribution at the keyword and website level?
- On a single website (such a page for finding a location), can the call tracking solution track calls from multiple phone numbers?
- How many phone numbers must be available for the call tracking system to provide you with the information you require?
- Does the call monitoring system work with all of the sales, marketing, and digital advertising platforms that your company employs?
- Can talks be recorded and transcribed using the call tracking software?
- How precise are the transcriptions, exactly?
- Is there machine learning and AI technology included in the call tracking solution that can extract insights from the transcriptions?
- Does the call tracking system give you the option to evaluate talks using aspects of the interaction that are crucial to your marketing, such as the caller’s or agent’s words?
- Can the call monitoring system track the number of incoming sales or appointment calls, as well as the conversion rate for such calls?
