INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Call Tracking 101: How to Kick Your Marketing in the Pants by Knowing What's
Working and What's Not! This guide is a primer for everything you need to know about call-tracking, and all of the measuring and analytic benefits it can provide to your business.
Many businesses are struggling to convert sales online, despite running plenty of pay-per-click ads, fully optimizing their landing pages, and launching social media campaigns.
Why?
Because for many businesses, the old-fashioned
phone call is still the best way to close the deal,
and they have no way to know where calls are
coming from.
You see, if people land on your website and call your company to buy, it looks the same as if they came to your site, considered your offer and took off without calling or buying. How do you know whether they decided to call you rather than filling out your contact form or just coming into your location? You simply don't have any clue what prompted them to call you!
Don’t let the gaps in data leave you flying blind. Call tracking is a powerful resource you can use to gain insights into which of your advertising efforts are driving phone calls – and which ones are failing miserably.
Let’s get started!
DON’T LET THE GAPS IN YOUR DATA LEAVE YOU
FLYING BLIND! CALL TRACKING IS A POWERFUL DATA TOOL YOU CAN USE TO
GAIN INSIGHTS INTO WHICH OF YOUR ADVERTISING
EFFORTS ARE DRIVING PHONE CALLS TO YOU
WHAT IS CALL TRACKING?
CallUsSmart.com uses technology that lets you see the real value of your marketing campaigns in relation to lead generation and ultimately, sales.
Responsible, successful business people have long wanted to know more about lead sources that come in, because most industries generate the best conversions from initial contact to sale over the phone – not with all of the social and web gizmos – the telephone converts the best.
If all of your leads and sales came from online sources, it would be easy to measure and track your company’s marketing efforts; however, because many customers will see your advertisement, read some published content, then call you without traveling through your online sales funnel, it’s almost impossible to know which ad channels are driving phone calls (and thus providing the best return-on-investment). Call tracking takes the guesswork out of the equation by managing all information about incoming telephone calls and giving you the metrics to measure your marketing efforts.
The Age of Accountable Marketing
Gut feelings will only get you so far, and very few companies have the marketing budget to attempt the “accuracy by
volume” (also called spray-and-pray) method of advertising. This is the age of an accountable, comprehensive, even a holistic view of marketing ROI; however, too many
companies, sales and marketing are so far removed from one another that it seems impossible to close the loop between marketing effort and inbound calls. Most business owners are usually amazed when they realize how much insight they gain when they start tracking call metrics.
Consider the phenomenon of the smartphone, its usage is
skyrocketing. People use their smartphones to research products, then make calls to place an order or learn more about that
product. Consumers have the ability to arrive at a landing page and simply touch on a phone number to make a call – the smartphone handles everything for them.
Combine that with the fact that some folks just want to talk to someone on the phone, and will not usually fill out an online form or make a large purchase over the Internet. Even in industries where they have tried to completely do away with phone-based sales representatives, such as the hotel industry, experts have found that up to 25% of all customers still call to make reservations, even if they’ve used the Internet to find the deal.
THE NEED FOR INSIGHT AND INFORMATION ABOUT THE CONNECTION BETWEEN YOUR MARKETING CAMPAIGNS AND THE PHONE CALLS YOU ARE RECEIVING IS GREATER
THAN EVER.
THAT IS WHERE CALL TRACKING CAN BRIDGE THE GAP.
How Does Call Tracking Work?
Call Tracking gives you the ability to create and manage multiple, unique, local or even toll-free phone numbers. If you’re used to the old and antiquated process of purchasing phone numbers directly from phone carriers, you already see the immense value in utilizing call tracking. So, now that you’ve got phone numbers, your call tracking portal will easily label, tag, track, record and search on each number.
Once you have your unique phone numbers, you will simply incorporate them into all of your marketing channels.
Maybe you have television commercials, run spots on the radio, send out direct mail, run ads on Twitter, or Facebook, or just use the tried-and-true Google AdWords method. With a different number for each campaign, the call tracking software is able to compile important metrics on all of your marketing efforts.
What If I’m A Small Business?
Call Tracking can be a huge help to any size business.
PEOPLE USE THEIR SMARTPHONES TO RESEARCH PRODUCTS,
THEN MAKE CALLS TO PLACE AN ORDER OR LEARN
MORE ABOUT A PRODUCT.
BY ASSIGNING EACH UNIQUE NUMBER TO A CAMPAIGN,
THIS WILL HELP “CLOSE THE LOOP” BETWEEN MARKETING AND SALES, BECAUSE YOU INSTANTLY
KNOW WHICH ADS ARE PRODUCING PHONE CALLS, AND WHICH ONES ARE NOT
If you’re a relatively small company and not using multiple marketing methods or medias (yet) you may have no need for multiple phone numbers. Even so, by incorporating call tracking software into your marketing efforts, you can still automatically collect data on phone metrics like how many calls you’re receiving and how long each call lasts. The on-phone equivalent of a “bounce” is about 40 seconds – call tracking can help you understand your “bounce rate” when it comes to customers and leads calling in. Additionally, by recording each call, you will have a wealth of information about how people are
responding to your offer and how your sales staff is handling every call. Many small businesses, though, do run multi-channel marketing
campaigns at the same time. Small brands that are trying to
aggressively grow might run several different advertisements at once based on different products or services. With Call Tracking you can
assign campaign-specific phone numbers to each unique ad, paid search ad group or even a keyword. By assigning each unique number to a campaign, this will help “close the loop” between Marketing and Sales, because you instantly know which ads are
producing phone calls, and which ones are not. Imagine the power of that!
USING CALL TRACKING TO DEMONSTRATE ROI
Marketing is a combination of art and science, but in recent years, it has definitely become more scientific. Marketing is now accountable to analytics, and the quantifiable data that shows what good marketing efforts are doing for a company.
The most important KPI (Key Performance Indicator) of all is Return on Investment or ROI. How much business are you getting in return for the dollars you’re spending on marketing? Most businesses don’t have the budget for creative or “brand” marketing like Nike and Coca-Cola; therefore you’ve got to make sure every ad is filling your sales pipeline and demonstrating its worth, or you won’t be able to keep running it. It doesn’t matter why you need to prove out your ROI – maybe you need to show a boss, a partner, an investor or your clients (or maybe you just need hard data to plan for the future). CallUsSmart.com can help you prove your ROI with actionable data so that your decisions are based on the actual numbers and not just gut-driven.
Lead Attribution
Regardless of whether you’re on a marketing team or running your own business, you need to pay attention to lead attribution. Essentially, how did that person who clicked their way to your website, signed up for your newsletter, called your phone or walked in the front door of your business find you in the first place? Every one of your leads needs to have attribution information, and you need precise ROI metrics attached to them, so that you can hold your marketing campaigns accountable.
Social, local and mobile advertising has helped businesses attract a lot more phone leads, but despite the rapid rise of call-based analytics, too many businesses aren’t attributing leads that call in; and that’s a shame. Phone calls are among the best leads that most businesses receive – usually higher quality than web traffic, users who filled out a form, or even walk-ins.
When you implement call tracking for your business, you can collect attribution data on every lead and determine which channels and campaigns are producing phone calls.
Remember, the goal isn’t to get clicks and calls – it’s to get revenue and new accounts! Clicks and calls are only worth something if they convert to sales. If you can show that you’re converting, you can easily
demonstrate your ROI.
Call tracking tracks what’s happening on each call, like whether the call resulted in a sale, the caller’s emotional state, the sales representative’s professionalism, if a client could be upsold and many other trackable, actionable metrics.
This will help you calculate not only lead scores, but help you train sales personnel to better handle incoming calls, and give you solid ROI calculations.
REMEMBER, THE GOAL ISN’T TO GET CLICKS AND CALLS – IT’S TO GET REVENUE AND NEW ACCOUNTS! CLICKS AND CALLS ARE ONLY WORTH SOMETHING IF THEY CONVERT.
PRIMING YOUR MULTI-CHANNEL
No matter how much online advertising grows, offline advertising is still critical for most businesses. Your marketing strategy needs to operate in several different channels, both on the web and off. The good news is that call tracking offers solutions for both.
Quality Leads and Understanding Opportunity
Call Tracking is especially critical for business-to-business enterprises, as phone calls can constitute the majority of a site’s conversions. Call tracking can also assist your business with understanding the quality of your leads, which advertising campaigns are generating the highest quality leads, and whether the copy in your ads and on your landing page is working to answer questions – or simply raising more. Call tracking can also give insight into how well your team is managing conversions. This added oversight will help inject greater effectiveness into your training and employee development programs.
A/B Testing with Call Tracking
Your normal online marketing efforts should include a great deal of A/B testing to ensure that everything on your website is operating at its maximum level of efficiency. Call tracking can be an important tool in your quest to understand consumer behavior. On top of your analytics and marketing performance data, you need to see which version of your ads are generating the most phone calls that end in sales. Does your ad copy perform better with local numbers, or toll-free numbers? Does your phone number perform better than an e-mail contact form? What is really driving phone calls and phone conversions? Without call tracking, you won’t have the tools you need to design truly effective A/B tests, and you will not have the ability to anticipate actions and understand what your customers need in order to take the next step in the funnel.
CALL TRACKING IS ESPECIALLY CRITICAL FOR
BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS ENTERPRISES, AS PHONE CALLS CAN CONSTITUTE
THE MAJORITY OF A SITE’S CONVERSIONS
Here are three ways you can A/B test a variety of offline tactics using call tracking:
1. Television and radio commercials. Many companies don’t have the budget to run two different commercials at once, but with a few edits or a little extra time in the recording studio, it’s easy to run two different versions of the same commercials and experiment with various
techniques and calls to action. With call tracking, you can use a different number for each version of the commercial and gauge
the effectiveness of each advertisement. Alternatively, you could run the same ad on multiple channels, but have a different phone number for each station or even different times of day to collect data on which audiences are
receptive, and at what times.
2. Direct mail. If you’re interested in testing the effectiveness of your direct mail campaign (and you should be), consider using call tracking to send out a few different experimental pieces to the same neighborhood. You can play around with the elements of the envelope, the design, the copy and other parts of your campaign, then track which gets the best results by ensuring that there’s a unique phone number for each variety of the campaign.
3. Print campaigns. Similar to television, radio and direct mail, by experimenting with different designs and calls to action in your printed materials, you can scientifically determine what elements work and which ones don’t.
Offline and Multi-Channel Marketing
Since the explosion of the Internet, marketing’s focus has shifted to digital – SEO, paid search, social media and more; however, offline marketing is still an
important part of any marketing effort, and call tracking can be a huge benefit to every single offline channel (except word-of-mouth).
Launching a multi-channel marketing campaign can help you reach a lot of different people at different stages of the buying cycle, each one with different needs and different characteristics. In order to capture all of these conversions, you will need tracking and reporting
technologies that can cover every channel.
CALL TRACKING HAS AN ARRAY OF POWERFUL TOOLS TO HELP YOU SURVEY EVERY
PHONE CALL THAT YOUR MULTI-CHANNEL MARKETING
CallUsSmart.com has an array of powerful tools to help you analyse every phone call that your multi-channel marketing efforts generate. You see, by assigning a unique number to each of your campaigns, you will be able to collect offline conversion data. Once collected, you can
experiment, measure and modify your campaigns to ensure you are getting the maximum ROI from all of your offline channels.
Understanding your Customer with Call Tracking
Call tracking can also be an important barometer of your customer education efforts. For example, if you run a spot on the radio and end up generating a lot of calls, you need to know how many of those ended in conversions. But you also need insight into each caller’s experience in order to understand what happened in the calls that didn’t end in conversions. Sure, sometimes consumers are calling your company because they are ready to buy. But if you are getting a large number of callers who are confused and asking for more information before they’re willing to buy, that suggests that you’ve got a clarity problem in your advertisements, and in the next modification, you need to fix that. Call tracking can give you the unique, specific insight you need to make the best decisions for the best results.
IF YOU ARE GETTING A LARGE NUMBER OF CALLERS WHO ARE CONFUSED AND ASKING FOR MORE INFORMATION BEFORE THEY’RE WILLING TO CLOSE A DEAL, THAT SUGGESTS THAT YOU’VE GOT A CLARITY PROBLEM IN YOUR ADVERTISEMENTS
THE CALL TRACKING AND LOCAL SEARCH MYTH
If you’re a small business owner looking to raise your organic ranking on the major search engines when it comes to local search, you may have read about some of the recent controversy surrounding call tracking and local search.
Here’s what happened: Some marketers without a comprehensive understanding of local search engine optimization (SEO) convinced enough small business owners to implement call tracking technology, but didn’t help them do it in the correct way. It ended up hurting those businesses’ long, hard efforts to raise their online profile through local SEO, and started a movement online to warn small businesses away from using call tracking.
Google, Bing and Yahoo typically use a concept called the Primary Key, which ties together data from different tables in a database. When it comes to local search, that Primary Key is known as the NAP – Name, Address and Phone Number. These are essentially a business’s definition on the Web, and the way that a search engine understands how to index (and rank) a small business’ web site. The search engines have been clear about the importance of a small business’ NAP being consistent across online directories in order to foster high local SEO rankings. Thus, having different phone numbers in various places online can confuse search engine algorithms and can hinder positive changes in rankings.
This is common knowledge among SEO experts, but many small business owners don’t have the time or resources to keep up on every emergent trend in the industry. So when these small business owners implemented call tracking, they introduced several different phone numbers for the same business onto different sites, which disrupted the continuity of their NAP, and quickly dropped their rankings. OUCH! Small business owners typically have small marketing budgets,
so they are looking for performance-based strategies that seem to be a sure thing. Naturally, they understood the value proposition
of call tracking – it is a fantastic way to track leads,
demonstrate lead quality, gain insight into customer behavior and prove out ROI. But it wasn’t put into place in a way that makes sense for these businesses, so it ended up hurting rather than helping.
If you are a small business owner who has looked into the option of implementing call tracking, but has been put off by recent bad press, let us offer some reassurance: Call tracking definitely has a place in local search, and can be a powerful tool as long as it’s implemented properly. There are places that call tracking numbers are particularly effective for small businesses, and places that can hurt a company’s local SEO efforts.
Using Call Tracking Effectively with Local Search
Some businesses have raised concerns about call tracking phone numbers ending up online, especially through coupon-reprinting sites like Yipit and InfoGroup scans of printed phonebook directories. Here’s the truth: So long as your NAP is consistent with your main listing on your Google Places for Business dashboard, you can use a single call tracking phone number without worry for any of your offline marketing efforts that may end up on the Web. You simply need to make sure you have your call tracking phone number listed in Google Places for Business as a second number, the way you would use a regular toll-free number alongside your local. By keeping your
dashboard updated, Google will be able to associate your call tracking with your primary data cluster, nullifying the chances that it will do any harm to your local SEO efforts.
Utilizing your call tracking number on your web site properly is also key to effectively implementing this technology. Your web site is considered authoritative by Google when it determines your location prominence. Your phone number is part of that all-important Primary Key, so when the search engines crawl your site and collect data, it’s critical they see your correct local number and ignore your call tracking number, which can change from campaign to campaign.
Here’s what needs to be done: Use a little JavaScript to make sure there is an official, NAP-consistent phone number in the site’s code for when search engines crawl and index your content. It’s a very simple solution called “No Script,” and you can implement it with ease.
<noscript>555-555-5555</noscript>
SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS TYPICALLY HAVE SMALL MARKETING BUDGETS, SO
THEY ARE LOOKING FOR PERFORMANCE-BASED STRATEGIES THAT SEEM
Of course you would substitute your actual NAP phone number for the number above. This script is recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium and is an effective way to ensure only your primary number is indexed by the search engines.
The number one priority is making sure that the NAP cluster of data indexed by the search engines is consistent across all of your online platforms. If you are planning to run an ad that will never get snatched up by coupon-hunting web sites or Yellow Pages scanners, such as a television spot, a radio ad, a bus shelter poster or a billboard, you can assign as many call tracking numbers as you need to get the data and results you want.
There is a list of experts a mile long who will confirm that call tracking technology is not only mainstream and incredibly useful to small business; they will also confirm that it will not hurt local SEO when
implemented properly. So if you’ve read that call tracking always – or even most of the time – hurts local SEO, that information is incorrect.
The bottom line is that if you are heavily relying on local search as a marketing channel, you can and should
implement call tracking to help you get a complete picture of the leads and sales you’re generating from your online marketing efforts. You have simply got to be careful to implement it in a NAP-friendly manner.
THE BOTTOM LINE IS THAT IF YOU ARE HEAVILY RELYING
ON LOCAL SEARCH AS A MARKETING CHANNEL, YOU CAN AND SHOULD IMPLEMENT CALL TRACKING
IN CONCLUSION
By now you should have a basic understanding of call tracking
technology and its incredible ability to shed light on your multi-channel marketing campaigns. Here’s a list of concrete steps you can take to put the knowledge contained in this guide into action for your business: 1. Go to CallUsSmart.com and sign up for the best option for your business based on how many Channels (Phone Numbers) you plan to use consistently.
2. Get your numbers.
3. Update your marketing to include your tracked numbers. Make sure all of your marketing materials and ads now reflect the new phone numbers you’ve subscribed for.
4. Plan your first A/B split test. You can A/B test almost anything with call tracking – whether offline or online. Let your current data guide you when selecting the marketing effort you most need to improve.
5. Audit your staff. Listen to call recordings and examine the way your sales reps are handling greetings, questions and conversions. Look for the patterns that jump out at you and implement training to bring trouble spots under control.
6. Make adjustments to your campaigns. Every new day will bring a wealth of new information by which you can analyze. Take the time to better understand which campaigns are driving offline conversions and which ones need to change. Now is the time to make those adjustments and start watching your metrics climb in a positive direction.
The most important thing to realize about call tracking is that it closes the gap between your marketing and sales, enabling you to understand which of your marketing efforts are truly driving conversions, and which are simply burning up precious time and resources (money). If
MAKE SURE ALL OF YOUR MARKETING MATERIALS AND ADS NOW REFLECT THE NEW PHONE NUMBERS
YOU’VE PURCHASED AND ASSIGNED TO EACH
you are not using call tracking, you are fishing with a hole in your net. It is long past time to close the loop and dial into success!
Now you are ready to get out there and put your knowledge to work. Experience is the best teacher, after all.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO REALIZE
ABOUT CALL TRACKING
IS THAT IT CLOSES THE GAP BETWEEN
YOUR MARKETING AND
Why Choose CallUsSmart.com
Fast Setup
We can setup your own call tracking platform in 48 hours Real Time Call Stats
Log into your platform, or even receive an email every time a call comes in and know when calls are coming in real time....this gets addictive!
Call Recording
Record every phone call that comes in. Then you can listen to them and see what might need improvement.
Full Caller ID Data
See the location and number as of the caller right in the platform dashboard
Easily Generate Call Reports
Reports can be generated with a few clicks – knowledge is power!
Email Alerts
Get email alerts when calls come in or goals are reached. Caller History
See a complete history of calls including duration & location. Round Robin
Set a list of phone numbers to receive calls in the order you determine.
Better User Permissions
Restrict access of users to just one phone number, if needed. Call Multiple Numbers At Once
Ring multiple phone numbers at the same time, the first to answer gets the call.
