Your phone rings. It’s an unknown number. If it’s your cell phone, you might ignore it and let it go to voicemail. But if it’s your business phone, you’ll probably promptly answer. 

In the best case scenario, it’s a potential customer calling to inquire about your hours, your services or goods, scheduling an in-person meeting or appointment or maybe even making a purchase over the phone.

That’s awesome and you should celebrate. But at some point, you should investigate how the person found your number exactly. Was it through a Google ad? Was it because your business name and number surfaced in Google Maps? Was it because they visited your website? If so, how did they find your website – through search, social media, or some other way, like an old school billboard? 

Call tracking is a powerful analytics tool that enables businesses to find out and analyze the sources of incoming phone calls. Once you know how people are finding your number, you can invest more resources into that driver of business. 

 

Call Tracking Software

The best way to implement call tracking is to designate unique phone numbers for different marketing channels. So one phone number is assigned to Google Maps. Another is assigned to your social media bios. Another stems from Google Ads.

These numbers are then routed to the business’s main phone number. Call tracking software documents the number that was dialed by the user, so that you can later see how a person found you. 

Top tier call tracking software even includes advanced features such as call recording, dynamic number insertion, and automatic updates of a customer’s profile into your customer relationship management (CRM) system. 

 

What are the Benefits of Call Tracking? 

 

• Better Return on Investments (ROI) 

Call tracking software and call tracking strategies help businesses identify which marketing channels are driving phone calls. This information helps you figure out where to put your time and money.

 

• Better Understanding of Customers

Beyond just tracking the source of calls, call tracking solutions often include features like call recording. This allows teams to gain deeper insights into customer interactions that occur over the phone, enabling them to refine their customer service and tailor their marketing messages based on real customer conversations. For example, you could develop a FAQ section on your website based on the questions people ask in phone calls.

You can train employees on how to respond to specific complaints. You can write scripts for employees on how to handle questions about returns and refunds. And call recording helps you evaluate employees. Recordings are also helpful in the event a transaction becomes legal in some way. You’ll have some proof of what was said. 

 

• Call Source Accuracy

One of the biggest advantages of call tracking is its ability to accurately measure which phone calls come from specific marketing efforts. This level of precision allows companies to measure the impact of various campaigns, keywords, and advertisements. If one of your goals from a PPC ad is to prompt calls, and your call tracking solutions show you no call was ever received from an ad, you know to change your strategy or change your goals. 

 

• Dynamic Number Call Tracking

Call tracking systems often use dynamic number insertion, which means unique phone numbers on a website are based on the visitor’s referral source (social, ad, or organic, for example) or demographics (like where a caller is located). This dynamic approach ensures that businesses can track calls back to their source, even if a potential customer finds your number and makes that call in complicated ways. 

 

• Optimized Ad Dollars

With call tracking software and local SEO call tracking, businesses can optimize their advertising spend by focusing on marketing endeavors that generate the most calls and conversions. You can finally stop guessing how customers found your number. Also important – you don’t have to ask customers how they found your number. Most people don’t want to tell a business how they found them – that takes time and effort. And sometimes they don’t remember or know. With call tracking software, you never need to ask. 

How to Get Started with Call Tracking

The first step is to define what you realistically expect from call tracking. You can’t expect to know every bit of data about every person who calls, and why they don’t finish a transaction.

With your team or on your own, figure out the exact goals and objectives you aim to achieve with call tracking. Whether it’s getting people to be happy with their products or goods, explaining policies, or refining marketing strategies, having a clear path is vital.

To accomplish this, figure out a call tracking solution that makes sense for your business. Think deeply about issues like the number of phone numbers needed, integration capabilities with other tools, and the level of data reporting needed.

After that, get into the nitty gritty of the call tracking software. This will mean you need to provide unique tracking numbers to different marketing strategies, whether those are campaigns, organic traffic, or Google Ads. You can even assign numbers to things like public transportation ads. 

Finally, be sure to take the time and energy to analyze the call tracking data to identify patterns. This means you’ll have to do some deep thinking, so don’t do it when you’re tired or as an afterthought. You want to look for trends and areas for improvement. Use what you learn to help the people on both ends of the phone call – you, your team, and the customers. 

 

Does Call Tracking Really Matter?

Yes, it does.

You can only get so far with old school marketing tactics. At some point, if you want to grow your business, you need to use technology to keep up. People go online to get the phone numbers of brick and mortar stores. There are no more white pages or yellow pages. So you want to make sure your phone number is in the right places, and do more to get in the right places.

This takes work. And if you already have too much work, let us handle this stuff for you. 

 

What does SEO Design Chicago charge? 

It all depends. That’s why we want to talk to you about your needs. And the funny thing is this – we use call tracking. So we can talk about how you got our number. 

If you want to talk more about call tracking, and how it relates to local SEO strategies, reach out to us. We’ll give you a free SEO page audit, and continue our discussions from there.