The 10 Secrets of Call Tracking to Boost Campaign Performance

Why Call Tracking Matters

The digital marketing agency industry is a tough business. Competition is fierce and client demands are high. Digital marketing is a results-driven business and agencies need to the tools to demonstrate the results they generate to their customers. Best-in-class digital marketing agencies are using call tracking to analyze campaign performance and significantly improve the return on future marketing initiatives. At a minimum, a call tracking system tracks and measures each phone call it receives. That alone makes the concept’s worth obvious in an increasingly mobile world.

Call tracking is about much more than tracking metadata. A comprehensive call tracking system is a powerful suite of digital marketing tools that provides real-time, campaign-specific analyses that highlight which campaigns work and which need to be altered or discarded. They use whisper messages that identify the campaign responsible for each call prior to connecting the answering employee with the inbound caller. They automatically route calls to specific departments or specialists. They integrate seamlessly with Google Analytics and integrate easily with websites.

Simply put, call-tracking systems supercharge marketing ROI in a mobile-first world, and that makes call tracking a critical component of any digital marketing agency’s service suite. So how can you get this working for you?

We’ve compiled the top 10 insider tips to implement call tracking and boost any marketing campaign’s effectiveness.

10 Call Tracking Tips for Better Marketing Today

Secret #1: Use Dynamic Number Insertion for Better Website Analytics

Dynamic Number Insertion enables real-time call tracking and data collection for calls tied to a specific website. All call-ins automatically log caller ID information, phone number, geographical location, website browsing history, and how they first found your website.

Setting up Dynamic Number Insertion is easy. Simply register a pool of three or more telephone numbers and input the number you’re currently using into your DNI system. Going forward, the number displayed on the website automatically changes to associate with a particular visitor’s session, carrying over all applicable information in the process. Rich, user-specific data facilitates targeted, high-ROI marketing.

Secret #2: Call Recording Provides Unprecedented Insight and Quality Control

Call recording, a critical call-tracking component, effortlessly wraps quality control, compliance, customer segmentation, and employee performance monitoring into a single package. Call recording separates the most effective sales employees from the underachievers, keeps inbound staff on message, and provides valuable insights into the right products to market to each caller.

Call recording also provides sales managers with instant access to sales calls in order to help improve their sales team’s pitch.

Secret #3: Call Tracking Supercharges Your Clients’ Google Analytics Suite

The combined power of Google Analytics and call tracking gives you a powerful analysis tool with more complete and accurate data. Google Analytics is undoubtedly a common tool digital marketing agencies use for their clients. However, Google Analytics does not inherently track incoming phone call data — with a call tracking solution, it can.

Digital marketers tag their phone numbers to specific campaigns and can then view and analyze the data within Google Analytics.

Secret #4: Whisper Messages Connect Clients with Hot Prospects

Whisper messages help sales agents and account managers peek around the curve and prepare for an inbound call. The secret: Before the agent connects, the whisper system provides the name of the campaign that produced the call. The agent then hits the ground running, telling the prospect exactly what he or she needs to hear from the get-go.

Secret #5: Call Routing Improves the Customer Experience

Call routing reduces time-to-answer and effectively routes inbound callers to the right staff members, eliminating the need to route through multiple intermediaries – or even a single human receptionist. When a lead or customer assigned to a specific salesperson or account manager calls in, they’re immediately connected to that person’s personal line.

Secret #6: Display Local Phone Numbers on your Global Website Automatically

To increase incoming calls, marketing agencies will use Geo-IP lookups to display a local phone number on their client’s website. Website visitors are more likely to call a local business. While call tracking enables marketers to manage local numbers, the same concept can be applied at a national level. For companies doing business in different regions of the world, country-specific numbers can be used. For example, your client’s website can display a UK number for UK visitors, an Australian number for Aussies, and a US number for Americans. All numbers can route to the same head office.

Secret #7: Campaign and Keyword Tracking Seamlessly Integrates Call Tracking with Other Inbound Media

Campaign and keyword tracking capabilities help your clients separate effective campaigns from not-so-effective campaigns. Simply assign a specific number to each campaign type – PPC, Facebook, direct mail, SEO, display ads, and more – to measure the volume and quality of calls produced by each.

Secret #8: Website Session Tracking Reverse-Engineers Callers’ Decision Timeline

Wouldn’t it be nice to show your clients exactly how their prospects made the decision to call? With call tracking, the webpage visit history is logged and reported. It shows each prospect’s online movements, including a full breakdown of each page visited prior to the call, directly to the tracking account holder. This information helps agencies improve website visitor engagement and conversions.

Secret #9: Custom Email Reporting Supports Real-Time Campaign Improvements

Custom email reports provide real-time call and conversion notifications, painting a richly detailed picture of a client’s entire marketing operation over time. Real-time reports facilitate on-the-fly diagnosis and improvement efforts for underperforming campaigns. Many digital marketing agencies deliver real-time email notifications to their clients to keep their agency top-of-mind and demonstrate the results being produced.

Secret #10: Dashboard Reports Make Trend Analysis a Walk in the Park

Dashboard reports complement email reports with a smorgasbord of big-picture data that’s tailor-made for effective, detailed trend analysis. These reports clarify the relationship between marketing investments and lead generation, conversions, and sales. That makes it easier to cut underperforming campaigns loose and reallocate resources to more effective methods. Agency clients get a much better understanding of what is going on, and that helps strengthen the client/agency relationship.

Don’t Wait for the Phone to Ring…

If your competitors aren’t already using a call-tracking package for their marketing clients, they’re probably thinking long and hard about it. As mobile marketing takes an ever-larger chunk of the overall marketing pie, marketing agencies and their customers no longer have any choice but to embrace the power of call tracking.

The case for call tracking is clear. It vastly improves the quality and quantity of campaign-specific data available to your clients, dramatically enhancing the effectiveness of lean marketing campaigns. It delivers results that often exceed client expectations and allow you to deliver on your promises. Most importantly, it boosts those critical client satisfaction metrics and raises your profile among marketing agencies.