Today’s most successful marketers make their decisions based on careful data capture and analysis. This is especially true when it comes to online advertising. Most PPC platforms give advertisers the ability to measure clicks, but this leaves a blindspot between the time the visitor clicks an ad and the business answers the call. Call tracking fills that blindspot and provides the insights that you need to increase your bottom line.
What is Call Tracking?
Call tracking is a marketing technology that provides in-depth information about the people who call your business, including how they initially found your phone number. One of the primary uses of call tracking is to correlate inbound calls with particular advertisements and marketing campaigns. Marketers can track calls down to the online campaign, ad and even keyword. This level of detail is incredibly valuable and can help to transform sales and marketing strategies. In fact, 92% of CallRail users spending over $100,000 on ads report that call tracking helped reduce their cost per lead.
How does it work?
Call tracking on websites is made possible with Dynamic Number Insertion. This feature dynamically swaps out the phone numbers on your website with tracking numbers that you own so that you can correlate those calls with the sources and ads that generated them. With Dynamic Number Insertion, CallRail displays a different tracking number for each source, such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Organic, Yelp or Facebook. This tracking number follows the visitor as they navigate your website and will appear each time the visitor subsequently returns to your site.
You choose the level of detail that you want from your calls.
CallRail offers a few options for tracking calls from online ads. The method that you should choose is contingent on exactly how much data you need.
- Keyword Call Tracking: Keyword Call Tracking allows you to correlate calls to visitors and track exactly which campaigns, ads and keywords are generating calls. In addition shedding light on the amount of calls that each ad produces, call tracking gives insight into what actually happened on each call. It’s great to know that a keyword or ad generated a lot of calls, but it’s equally important to know which keywords generated calls that actually led to sales. This knowledge enables search marketers to optimize campaigns, targeting the right leads and making it easier for them to find what they’re looking for.
- Campaign-Level Tracking: If you don’t need the granular data that Keyword Call Tracking provides, Campaign-Level Tracking may be a better fit for you. With Campaign-Level Tracking, you simply assign a unique tracking number to each campaign or source that you’re interested in tracking. For example, this tracking number can be placed directly in banner ads and click-to-call ads in various PPC platforms. With Campaign-Level Tracking, you see the big picture of your ads’ performance by allowing you to monitor the success of all of your PPC efforts.
Case Study: Supply.com Cut Advertising Budget by 50%
Supply.com provides home renovation products to professionals and large retailers using direct sales and retail eCommerce. While David Gallemeier, Marketing and Development lead for Supply.com, had embedded data tracking capability in the firm’s website to track leads from the web, CallRail was able to provide insight into what happened after the lead landed on the site by tracking leads from the call center. With CallRail’s data, Supply.com’s web developers were able to attribute phone calls to web sessions.
With this information, Supply.com was able to cut AdWords spend by 50% and pull under-performing product advertisments from Amazon.com.
“CallRail helps us better understand our products, our customer interactions and what’s happening through our call center,” Gallemeier continued. “Through that visibility, we can significantly boost the performance of every advertising dollar, while recapturing previously wasted spend to put back into our business.”
