Information is the lifeblood of marketing. The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to promote yourself to them. But while marketing has become increasingly digital, sales calls are decidedly analog. Call tracking connects these two technologies, showing exactly how your digital marketing affects real-world sales. So what is call tracking? How does it work? And most importantly, how can it improve your business?

Basics of Call Tracking

Call tracking relies on a combination of HTTP cookies and dynamic number insertion, commonly known as DNI. Cookies track the websites, web content, social media, and digital ads your customers interact with before they call you. Dynamic number insertion is a software program that generates a unique phone number on each web page, ad, or social post your customers interact with.

These two programs are linked, so when a customer calls, you know exactly what ad, website, or webpage convinced them to pick up the phone. Even though each customer sees a separate phone number, the software forwards all calls to a single line, so your company does not wind up with a messy matter of dozens of separate phone numbers attached to it. Instead, when a call is received, you get a perfect record of its source (Google, FaceBook, etc.) and the path the caller took to get there.

Besides tracking digital interactions, the software also records and transcribes each call. It supplies the customer’s name as well, along with their phone number, location, and business, if they’re calling from one. This type of background data not only provides valuable insight into your customer base, it sets the stage for further follow-ups and sales.

Benefits of Call Tracking

Whether you run a large business or a small one, almost every company benefits from call tracking. By documenting sales and marketing data, call tracking allows you to:

  • Measure the Effectiveness of Your Campaigns. Call tracking provides immediate feedback about your marketing efforts. It shows which campaigns produce the most qualified leads, so you know how best to promote your business.
  • Identify Your Strongest Keywords. Understanding what words and phrases drive organic traffic is key to success in the digital marketplace. Setting up a call tracking system lets you know what keywords resonate with your customers.
  • Determine What Types of Content Users Enjoy. Customers are hungry for content, but not everything wets their appetite. Some like blogs, while others prefer infographics, videos, ebooks, or whitepapers. Call tracking lets you see what material interests your customers, so you can produce more of it.
  • Discover Which Channels are Most Popular with Customers. Knowing what platforms customers frequent most often helps focus your marketing efforts. Call tracking lets you monitor traffic from:
    • Your website
    • Third-party websites
    • Search engines, such as Google
    • Pay-per-click ads
    • Google Business profiles
    • Social media pages

Additional Advantages

Call tracking can enhance your business in several other ways as well. The system is customizable, designed to meet the needs of your business and elevate sales accordingly. Besides the features above, owners can also implement:

  • Call Whispering. Plays a short message to the salesperson before they pick up a call, telling them the source and the marketing campaign responsible for it, giving your staff some vital information about the caller before they pick up the phone.
  • Call Greeting. A short message that’s played to the customer before they talk to one of your sales representatives or at any time during the sales process ‒ a useful way of keeping customers informed if you need to transfer them between departments.
  • Local Number Generation. In certain industries, such as healthcare and car repair, customers need to know you’ve got a brick and mortar location in their area. For this reason, businesses with multiple offices or service centers can program their call tracking system to only generate local numbers, based on each customer’s whereabouts.
  • Dynamic Tracking. Call tracking software can be used to “score” calls. It’s a way for business owners to monitor the success of their sales staff by monitoring metrics such as call duration and conversions. They can even score calls based on demographic data. However, not every metric may be important to you. Dynamic tracking allows you to focus only on data that boosts sales numbers while ignoring stats that add nothing to the bottom line.

Call Tracking with YPM

Call tracking is an inexpensive way to elevate your marketing. The system is easy to integrate into your existing software and processes information in real time, so you know right away where your leads are coming from and which campaigns are generating the largest ROI. Let our experts help you achieve better results for less spend. Contact us today!