Digital Marketing Insights from Call Tracking
Phone calls are an essential part of any business – regardless of size. They allow customers to directly interact with your brand, give them answers to their questions, and provide the instant gratification and piece of mind that can only be conveyed through human interaction. All of these factors hopefully lead the prospective customer to decide on whether their particular needs align with your products or services. In fact, research shows that calls occur at strategic times in the customer journey, when users are close to converting and just need a small bit of missing information before making a purchase decision.
From a business perspective, phone calls help connect you with motivated customers and gives you the chance to learn more about their needs. With markets ripe with competition and consumers constantly getting barraged by ads, it’s vital that businesses take every chance to understand and streamline their customers’ journey.
When it comes to digital marketing, calls are commonly overlooked because customer service via phone is usually implemented before any digital efforts are pursued. Your website and Yelp profile may feature your number and the calls come trickling in, but as your business grows you might be interested in the main drivers behind these calls. That’s where call tracking comes in: Call tracking is a way to attribute calls to certain sources, mediums, campaigns, and keywords.
Proper attribution is crucial because it allows you to identify areas of the business that are lacking and focus on the areas that are driving growth on your KPIs.
The Good – Google Ads has a complimentary call reporting feature that reveals basic call details such as:
- Duration
- Call start and end time
- Caller area code
Individually, these metrics leaves a lot to be desired but the important feature is that you can qualify calls of a certain duration as a conversion and optimize towards them. So if you think calls with a duration greater than 3 minutes are valuable, you can tell Google’s machine learning to optimize towards that goal.
The Bad – A random Google forwarding number is used and does not get tied to the user or your account in general. The number that’s shown to a user will be recycled and reused in another ad in the future so customers won’t be able to redial that number to reach your business. And without a callers’ phone number, it’s difficult to keep track of leads if you’re using a CRM.
For smaller operations, standard call reporting through Google Ads may suffice, but larger ones or businesses looking to scale should definitely consider a third party call tracking service. These pay-as-you-go services will provide additional oversight in areas like:
- Call recordings
- Which channels or landing pages are driving calls
- Caller insights
- Name
- Number
- Location
- IP address
At Four15 Digital, we use these valuable pieces of information to optimize our digital marketing efforts across multiple channels.
- Call recordings allow us to go back, listen to callers, and align our ad copy to popular topics.
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- Call duration gives insight into how long a call from a promising lead lasts. Dynamic number insertion allows for multi-channel attribution. This reveals which of your marketing channels are driving most calls and the quality of those calls.
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- Caller insights allow for better customer management in your CRM by providing names and locations.
Listening to phone calls is just another great method of shining light on the ever-changing customer journey and adjusting your marketing funnel to capture your ideal customers. You have to know your audience in order to sell to them and phone calls are a time-tested way of getting to know someone. If you are looking to setup call tracking for your business, we recommend our how-to guide.
Rest easy knowing that you’ve covered yet another important marketing area. Now you just have to worry about answering the phone.
