Tracking website visitors and conversations but not calls? SHAME ON YOU!

Digital marketing agencies are no strangers to data – indeed, you name it and they probably have it – well, most of it, anyway. With so many decisions being data-based, it is downright amazing to see so many digital agencies failing to track calls associated with a marketing campaign. If you work with a marketing agency, you need to ask them about your incoming call performance.

There is no shortage of statistics comparing an online lead to an online marketing campaign; depending on what report you read, an incoming call is somewhere between five to 10 times as valuable as an online lead – i.e. someone completing an online form. So then the question becomes, why are most of the statistics digital marketing agencies report to their clients revolving around online activity? Don’t misunderstand us here – while it is very important to grasp how online marketing is performing, it only provides a portion of the bigger picture.

Why you should be “ashamed” that you’re not using call tracking

Call tracking statistics help paint a more complete, comprehensive picture of how a specific campaign is performing, or even just how efficiently a website is working to generate leads. With call tracking, marketers can analyze what campaigns are generating the calls. What’s more, it’s not that unusual to see a campaign flop when only online metrics are analyzed; in many cases, if call tracking solutions been in place, a seemingly poorly-performing campaign would in fact be generating high-quality leads via incoming phone calls.

We’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth doing so again: Best-in-class digital agencies understand the sheer importance of call tracking implementation, as well as the fact that not all calls are “valuable.” This is where “conversation tracking” comes into play, as more sophisticated call tracking solutions will not only track the call but will analyze and understand the conversation to determine if it qualifies as a lead.

The details regarding how this is accomplished is somewhat outside the scope of this particular article, but suffice to say that with conversation tracking in place – wherein robo-calls, wrong numbers and “tire-kickers” are weeded out of the stats – the true performance of a marketing campaign can be measured.