Why Businesses Should Track Where Calls Come From

Do you know how many phone calls your advertising campaigns are generating for you?

You should. And you can.

Phone Call Conversion Rates Average 30-50%

According to Invoca, conversion rates from phone calls average 30-50%, which is massively higher than average online conversion rates.

With mobile phones more common than toothbrushes, and more than 50% of search traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s only getting easier to for people to conclude their web searches by placing a phone call to your company. Not to mention that 81% of mobile phone users in the U.S. have smartphones.

Measure Your Advertising ROI

The #1 reason to track your calls is to measure your return on investment from advertising.

Many of the businesses that come to StubGroup Advertising for help are tracking how many online interactions they get from customers (form submissions, newsletter subscriptions, applications, etc.), but they have no idea how many calls are coming from people who saw/clicked their ads.

If you:

Are spending money on advertising. . .
AND you want to receive phone calls. .
BUT you are not using call tracking. . .

Then you don’t really know the true value and success/failure your advertising campaigns are delivering you.

A sophisticated call tracking system like what we use for our clients allows you to:

Track the number of calls you receive from each advertising channel
Report calls to the keyword level for Google AdWords campaigns
Associate phone calls with visits in Google Analytics
Report ONLY relevant phone calls as conversions in Google AdWords
Record phone calls for detailed analysis

Spend Your Ad Dollars More Effectively

When you know which channels, campaigns, and even keywords are driving you valuable calls, you can spend your money on generating more of those good calls instead of on the things that don’t work.

Remember Jon Wanamaker’s famous quote? “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Jon would have loved call tracking.

When we optimize PPC campaigns for StubGroup’s clients, we’re looking at the whole picture — including online interactions and phone calls — to decide which campaigns to prioritize, which ads are working best, and how much to bid for specific keywords.

Listen to Call Recordings to Increase Your Close Rate

Smart businesses view every customer interaction as a learning experience.

Here at StubGroup, we listen to the calls our sales team has with businesses who reach out to us for help creating and managing their PPC campaigns. Are we properly explaining the value we can provide? Are we doing a good job understanding each business’s unique pain points and how we can solve them?

You would be amazed at how much you can learn (and improve) by just listening to your sales team’s calls.

These are a few examples of real problems we’ve identified for our clients by listening to recorded phone calls:

Answering service did not know the answers to obvious questions
Customer service reps were putting callers on unnecessary, multi-minute holds
Client had not updated their automated “holiday hours” greeting after the holiday
Employees were answering calls with a greeting that was confusing callers

Use Call Tracking for More Than Advertising

Some of our clients use call tracking to track EVERY single call they receive from any method. That provides them with powerful insights that extend far beyond just which campaigns they should spend more money on.

Track how many/which calls you receive from Organic traffic so that you can assess the value of that Organic traffic and make informed decisions about SEO and improving your Organic rankings
Identify how many people call you after coming directly to your website
Compare email campaigns to see which approaches or content drive the most valuable calls (and then prioritize that approach/content)

How Call Tracking Works

It’s much easier to track calls than most people think.

There are two types of calls: Onsite and Offsite.

Onsite calls come from people who called the phone number they saw on your website.

Offsite calls come from people who called a phone number they saw/heard somewhere other than your website (e.g. search engine results page, billboard, radio ad, email signature, etc.)

You can track onsite calls by:

Installing a simple piece of code on your website
Purchasing tracking numbers
Picking which sources of traffic you want to track (e.g. Google AdWords, Facebook, email campaigns, etc)
Deciding at what number(s) you want to receive calls

You can track offsite calls by:

Purchasing a tracking number for each source you want to track (e.g. billboard, radio ad, tear-off, banner ad, etc.)
Deciding at what number(s) you want to receive calls