The Dos and Don’ts of Call Tracking

When properly handled, call tracking software solutions can be a godsend in the marketing agency world. They can reveal which ads are leading to phone calls, track calls back to website visitors and down to keyword level and track online campaigns such as AdWords, PPC, mobile, organic and social. Designed for businesses, agencies and advertising platforms alike, call tracking solutions can also be used for offline campaigns in print, TV, radio and more.

And while the approach extends to such areas as optimizing an advertising budget and call center performance, as well as divulging which agents are driving results, call tracking can sometimes harm certain elements of your campaign, such as SEO, if not implemented correctly. That’s precisely why we created this “Dos and Don’ts of Call Tracking” article, so that you may learn how to take your marketing agency to the next level.

Of course, the “dos” outweigh the “don’ts,” as you will see in a moment…

DO:

  • Use Call Tracking DNI on Your Website – Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) allows marketers to track which campaigns, keywords and ads generate phone calls and which don’t, accomplished via a snippet of JavaScript that dynamically generates a unique phone number when a visitor arrives on a site. It should be noted that this does not harm SEO or impact NAP.
  • Gather Data via Call Tracking Reports – As a marketing representative, you should use call tracking to make decisions about future marketing expenditures…however, this data is only as good as the action that follows. If you choose not to use the data that call tracking provides about ads, keywords and campaigns – something we’ve unfortunately witnessed before – you shouldn’t really be using a call tracking solution.
  • Use Call Recording – Is call recording an often unused feature for you and your campaigns? This is bad. Call recording comes for free with even the most basic call tracking packages, so you should take advantage of it to gather important customer data for your clients and improve their customer experience. They can also gather lead quality and campaign ROI data.

DON’T:

  • Use Call Recordings on Your Directories – These actually HARM SEO; we have seen some call tracking solution providers try to brush the problems with SEO and call tracking under the rug…and they shouldn’t. When call tracking is used incorrectly it can actually hurt SEO, and a good example of this is using call tracking numbers on various online directories.
  • Ignore Call Tracking Data – One of the biggest mistakes marketing agents can make is “sinning in ignorance” – in other words, marketers that fail to gather and/or heed call tracking metrics will make mistakes, run into blind spots and ultimately engage in false ROI calculations.

The moral of the story here is to use call tracking…but please use it properly.