Implementing call tracking and reporting is essential for your marketing strategy. Learn eight crucial call tracking metrics you need to know.
65% of customers choose to contact a business over the phone, compared to only 24% who prefer to fill out a webform.
It is more important than ever in this digital age for digital marketers to combine data for offline call conversions and online web based conversions. They need to show businesses a clear picture of their ad’s performance.
The results of call tracking, attributing and reporting give you insight into:
To improve your marketing strategy with call tracking and reporting, you need to have a good understanding of the metrics you need to measure and optimise campaign performance.
Here are the eight most important metrics you should be looking at.
Knowing which campaigns and ads drive the most calls arms you with the knowledge of understanding where you should be focusing your marketing budgets and efforts.
But how exactly can you get this information if you have the same phone number listed on your website, in newspapers, social media channels, local listings, advertisements, and landing pages?
To ensure an effective call tracking and reporting strategy for your Google Adwords, you should use unique tracking numbers to advertise in these channels. For online activity, instead of placing a static tracking number, you should use dynamic phone numbers.
Detailed reporting for the number that was dialled gives you insight into which of your advertising channels are generating the most amount of calls.
Choosing Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) over ordinary static phone numbers leaves you with a number of advantages:
By tracking your call volume, you gain access to attribution data, and you can see which ads are driving the majority of phone calls. It also delivers you instant insight for a better understanding of your ROI.
Call volume reports show you valuable call patterns, which is just as important as collecting data on the number of website visits.
Although these do not give a clear picture on how much revenue is being generated, they still showcase which advertising channels are working or not working!
Call volume is an excellent measurement tool for tracking the success of your SEO and PPC strategies.
For example, you have just added some optimisation strategies to your Google My Business Listing. You complete this listing by filling out the company data fields, responding to some reviews and uploading new photos for your business.
How do you measure the success of this hard work?
Pay close attention to the numbers of:
Tracking your call volumes allows you to see metrics of the growth in the overall percentage increase of inbound calls from your dedicated Google My Business (GMB) tracking number.
Now you can measure the success of these Google My Business optimisations, and set further goals to improve this in the future.
Even if your calls are being answered, paying close attention to call duration will set your calls apart.
You might be receiving 50 calls per day, however if most of these calls are less than a minute, what’s the outcome?
The longer you are on the phone having a conversation with your leads and opportunities, the higher chance they are to convert into a customer.
After all, why would someone choose to pick up the phone and call your business if they weren’t interested in your product or service?
Once a customer has done their research and calls you, they are as hot a lead as can be. All of your marketing efforts (SEO, social, PPC, display advertising and remarketing) have worked hard to get them to call. Make sure you leave a good impression.
Tracking call duration metrics will allow you to break down the length of each call, which campaigns are delivering the most effective calls, and how to improve your phone handling skills.
How are you handling your calls?
Your call volumes from your PPC campaigns may be high and seem to be performing well. However, if your business is not answering these calls, then you are throwing away potential revenue opportunities.
Your customers have done all their research online, chosen your brand and decided to call your business. They expect to receive the same level of service they would receive from an online channel, and at least for you to answer their call.
For example, if your business was a local Plumber and you wanted to know how much revenue you were potentially missing out on, you could look at your average cost per sale.
If you knew your average cost per sale was $800 and that 1 in 4 calls into your business resulted in a sale, then every call you are missing into your business could potentially be worth an additional $200.
If you missed 20 phone calls a week, this could be an additional $4,000worth of revenue for your business.
Make sure you have rules and follow up procedures with missed call email alerts and SMS notifications to make sure you are contacting these prospects back to save these opportunities.
One of the most valuable call tracking metrics is understanding the time and day of your calls, and which is driving the largest percentage of conversions.
Any advertising campaigns should be leveraging this data, regardless of which services or products you are offering. Especially PPC agencies who you are using to track your inbound calls.
You can spot the connection between the time of the day and call frequency. By taking advantage of these insights, you can get a better understanding of your PPC ads and bid more aggressively at times when you know your audience is ready to engage with your brand.
For example, let’s say your client is a local automotive car service centre.
While monitoring major call tracking metrics over the start of your campaigns, you are likely to see an increase of call spikes early on Monday mornings, when people are trying to book their car for a service.
The best decisions would be to increase your advertising budget and spend more aggressively early mornings, when your customers are trying to book in for a service before going to work or ready for the day. Then you would decrease the budget for afternoons and for the middle of the week.
You could consider including some unique offers or changing the messaging of your ads on your lower traffic days to attract a different type of audience.
A new caller is someone who has never called your business before. This is an important segment of your business’s target audience because it represents potential new customers.
Consider separating data on new callers from repeat callers. Using Smart Tags in your Google Analytics integration will let you isolate and send only new caller details into GA and in turn provide better analysis.
By isolating new callers, you can analyse the online journey they took on your website, and understand specific behaviours such as which pages they visited before calling you.
This gives you great insight into which of your website pages are converting well, or which ones need more improvement and possibly better call to actions to drive phone conversion. Your marketing strategy will also gain improvements, as you can go back and optimise these pages for SEO and content.
You can even start using smart routing features, by routing new callers to specific agents or departments in your business to give them the best experience and get them to the correct person immediately.
When a customer clicks on an ad and visits your PPC landing page, your users are usually given a couple of options to get in contact with your business:
Without reporting for Google Ads, your PPC conversion rate will seem much lower than it actually is.
If you are only measuring data about the number of your online leads, you are missing out on a tonne of information which will help your marketing strategy. Campaign optimisation will also be impacted, as you may be removing budget from keywords or campaigns that aren’t driving online leads, however they are driving high converting phone calls.
Businesses are investing more heavily into sales cycles and funnels. They understand that the phone call is just one part of the larger journey that a customer makes when searching for the brand.
Prospects will do all their research online, going through your website, social media channels and reviews from various sources before deciding to speak with sales.
It is important for marketers to track and understand all the touch points that happened before the inbound phone call:
The customer’s online journey leading to the call. i.e. did they click on a FacebookAd, come back through a Google Ad and then finally visit your website by typing in the URL directly to make a call. Without call tracking and reporting for your Google Adwords you will miss out on this vital information.
This cutting edge technology will allow you to see which marketing techniques are most effective for driving prospects deeper into the purchasing funnel.
When deciding which metrics are most necessary to measure, consider your marketing goals and business size.
Small businesses usually set up 5 dynamic phone numbers to track their social networks,Google Ads, organic and direct traffic. The numbers are dynamically inserted into the website using a piece of javascript which is fired within Google TagManager or directly on the website.
Thanks to cookies in the user’s browser, the visitor will see the same phone number each time they approach your business online to give better call attribution and modelling.
Small businesses are also leveraging Google My Business and including a static number to measure call volumes and outcomes from this source.
Larger companies will usually require more numbers if they are operating more complex marketing funnels. Connecting this data to their CRM’s and reporting tools will give them the best understanding of call tracking, enabling them to more accurately measure their ROI.
The most crucial metrics you should be tracking to understand the true outcome of your call tracking strategy are time and day of calls, call volume and call source.
Integrating call reporting and data into your 3rd party platforms and CRM systems is an excellent way to deliver complete marketing solutions, where all conversions must be measured accurately.
