Essential Call Tracking Metrics

Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Them Any Longer

Even the best marketers and marketing agencies have campaigns that flop – or do they? They may actually be winners if you’re tracking calls. Call tracking is a technology approach which enables marketers to track phone calls associated with performance-based advertising. As a method of “performance review” for advertising, call tracking also supplies additional analytic information about the phone calls.

When we talk about “call tracking metrics,” what are we referring to exactly? Perhaps the better question is, if your closest competitors in the marketing agency sector are studying these call tracking metrics, can you really afford not to? A plethora of agencies have added call tracking software to their arsenal of PPC tools, which means they can now track their clients’ campaigns, keywords, match types, ads and landing pages that drive inbound calls to the particular business.

If you aren’t using call tracking, you’re missing out on a wealth of data that can significantly improve your marketing efforts. Let’s take a look at the three major call tracking metrics – source, conversions and context – and why you can’t afford to ignore them any longer:

Source

If you set up a client’s website mainly to generate leads through phone calls, you have to attribute these calls to the correct source of traffic so that the value you have added to the client’s bottom line through multiple marketing channels (social media, email, PPC, SEO et al) can ultimately be proven in monetary terms. Through call tracking software, you can determine how many phone calls were derived from SEO, how many came from PPC, etc.

Conversions

Call tracking metrics, most importantly, can help you track conversions for each marketing platform in your campaign. Even though not all calls convert to customers instantly, call tracking allows you to trace new customers back to their original call, giving you a more accurate assessment of which platforms in your campaign are achieving the most conversions.

Context

Advanced call tracking software platforms take the concept much further by analyzing the conversations that happen on the call to provide context and relevancy scoring. These metrics are being analyzed by agencies large and small to understand why consumers take actions or fail to take actions on websites. From marketing divisions to software support teams, the ability to tie a phone call back to the website interaction that led to it is invaluable. Now, marketers can bear witness to navigation patterns that yield more phone calls.

Sure, you can probably rattle off your average CPC, CTR and CPA… but do you know your cost-per-call conversion and are you aware of other call metrics having to do with your clients? More importantly, do you know if your call conversions are turning into revenue? It’s time to look at call tracking metrics.