How does call tracking software work

 Call tracking works by assigning a local or 800 number to a business phone line so that when the 'new' number is called, it forwards the call to the business line. The assigned number is tied to technology that has the ability to track: Caller information (phone, location, name)

What is Call Tracking Software?

Call tracking software allows marketers to get data from phone conversations with customers that can prove exactly what marketing campaign or tactic drove the phone call and what the result of the call was. For example, if you call a business that is using call tracking, they can tell what ads, web pages, and even the keywords that helped drive you to call.

And once you’re on the phone, conversational analytics can be used to analyze the language used in the call to tell if you bought anything, got a quote, made an appointment — or what marketers like to call a “conversion.” You can then use the data to get attribution for marketing campaigns, optimize ads, web pages, social media, and other advertising mediums to get more high-value customers on the phone.

Without call tracking, it’s impossible to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts that drive sales calls because your data trail goes cold when potential customers pick up the phone.

How Does Call Tracking Software Work?

Cloud-based call tracking software like Invoca enables marketers to tie customers’ digital journeys to phone calls using online data collection via unique, trackable phone numbers. Invoca’s call tracking and analytics are made possible with a website tag. The tag is a snippet of JavaScript code placed on your website that automatically replaces standard, static phone numbers with trackable, dynamic phone numbers that are unique to each site visitor. These dynamic numbers act as a unique identifier for an individual’s website session.

Check out this video to see how call tracking works:

Beyond managing dynamic phone numbers, the Invoca tag also captures other data, such as UTM source, medium, paid search keyword, and Google ClickID. Additional customer journey data like page visitation and unique customer identifiers are captured from the browser cookie.  With this data, you can understand exactly which marketing tactics are driving your high-value phone calls.

When a person calls an Invoca-supplied phone number, the call is routed through the Invoca platform to a call center, local agent, or any other destination. This allows Invoca to aggregate the digital data and tie the callers’ previous activity to the phone call. This happens nearly instantaneously with no interruption to the caller experience.

Why Do I Need Call Tracking?

Calls are often the most valuable conversions marketers drive — according to Forrester, 84% of marketers say phone calls have higher conversion rates with higher average order value (AOV) than other forms of engagement. If you’re not tracking the phone calls your marketing drives, you’re getting an incomplete picture of your ROI.

With call tracking, you can identify which digital ads, keywords, and webpages are the most effective at driving phone calls to your business. You can also see how many of those phone calls are high-quality leads and conversions. This gives you full end-to-end attribution for your campaigns and helps you make smarter optimization decisions to drive more revenue.

How Can Marketers Use Call Tracking?

Marketers most frequently use call tracking to optimize paid search and other digital marketing performance, personalize the caller experience and enhance the end-to-end customer journey by unifying online and offline data sources. The big benefits that many call tracking users see are reduced cost-per-click (CPC) on paid search, reduced cost-per-acquisition (CPA), and increases in return on ad spend (ROAS).

• The benefits of inbound call tracking

• Track the full ROI (return on investment) from your marketing campaigns

• Get credit for all of the phone call conversions your marketing drives

• Optimize media spend to drive higher quality leads

• Reduce wasted advertising budget

• Enhance caller profiles with conversation data

• Retarget callers based on the content of their phone conversations

• Use common phrases from conversations to improve your marketing messaging

• Improve call conversion rates by tracking and optimizing sales agent performance 

• Integrate conversation intelligence data with your existing technology stack

What Industries Should Use a Call Tracking Solution?

Any industry that relies on inbound calls to acquire customers should use a call tracking solution. This way, they can understand the marketing programs that are driving the most value and optimize accordingly. Examples include automotive, healthcare, home services, financial services, franchises, insurance, travel, telecom, real estate, and more.

How to Unify Data from Clicks and Calls with Call Tracking

In order to get the closed-loop attribution you need to optimize your digital marketing, you need to capture data for each unique consumer. This information is contained in a caller profile, where a marketer can store a veritable cornucopia of relevant data. These data come in various forms:

• Customer journey data like ad exposure and website visitation (you might think of this as cookie or campaign data)

• First-party data, like customer records, that can be pulled in from a marketer’s CRM

• Third-party demographic data

• Call data that includes standard metrics like length of the call, time of day, caller area code, and more

• Conversational data derived from conversational analytics and other AI-based tools

By unifying these datasets into a rich caller profile and associating it to the phone call, you now have the basis to understand which marketing programs are driving the most calls and begin putting this information to good use. Watch this video to see how it works.