Call Tracking is a method marketers use to determine the source of inbound phone calls. It's become a powerful tool for small and medium sized businesses that are looking to maximize the ROI (return on investment) off their marketing campaigns. There are many reasons to use a call tracking number, however determining the source of leads is primarily the reason marketers gravitate towards them.
Real World Case Study on Call Tracking:
Joe, our client at The Awning Warehouse uses two unique call tracking numbers that both forward over to the actual number from his store. However, one call tracking number which is displayed on the website is an organic phone number, the other he uses for call tracking digital ads on Google Pay-Per-Click. Joe uses these 2 numbers to distinguish organic call volume from the website from the calls that he is paying Google for in his Adwords campaign. It provides him a method of seeing what each one of those calls is costing him as well as a method to listen back to his calls and see the quality of the leads his marketing campaign produced. Now that's solid marketing. Kudos for Joe.
Adding Call Tracking to a traditional print campaign
Call tracking can be added to your print campaigns as well. Pretty much any scenario you can think of where you'd be paying to display your phone number and would want to know the exact return on investment, would be the ideal opportunity to use a call tracking number. If you plan on running a monthly ad in a magazine or newspaper, you would definitely want to utilize a call tracking number in lieu of your store number so that you could gauge how effective your ad was in generating calls. If you are putting your phone number on the side of your fleet vehicles, you should use a call tracking phone number to see how many calls were generated from your rolling billboards.
Determining ROI from your digital campaigns becomes much easier when adding call tracking to your ads
Because tracking numbers are so cheap to run - typically less than $5 per month per number, it makes sense to use them frequently; particularly when trying to ascertain what your actual cost per lead is from phone calls. Reporting is sophisticated, and you can see an exact breakout per month, be able to listen to calls back for quality assurance, as well as be able to archive calls for training staff on fielding inbound calls. It's incredibly eye opening what you can learn in a short amount of time from call tracking, particularly if you are a business owner or principal and are not the one typically fielding your inbound calls.
Call Tracking Services We Recommend
All of the above mentioned companies have their strong and weak points. We've evaluated each one of their services over the years and CallFire stands out above the others as "Best in Class" for ease of use in implementation, low monthly price point for call tracking numbers, expansive reporting suite, and easily integrated IVR component for creating sophisticated phone trees for routing calls. Which is especially useful if your business has multiple locations that you'd like to track inbound calls on.
If you'd like to learn even more about how integrating Call Tracking into your own marketing campaigns can help save your business thousands, help improve lead quality, and help lower conversion costs, give us a call at (916)-467-9118, and yes, it's a call tracking number. :)