The ability to drive phone calls through your online presence gives you a valuable tool for bridging the gap between traditional and digital marketing channels. But consumer paths to conversion are generally not neat and clean, and they rarely occur through the same channel. Call tracking helps you determine which of your campaigns for driving phone calls are the most successful.
While driving phone calls is great, you can learn so much more when you also have access to information about how well your efforts are going, whether you're getting a good return on your investment and how you can improve on your campaign or plan future strategies. Call tracking is easy to implement, but you need to take certain steps to effectively manage phone call referrals and gather data on their success. Here are a few strategies to make call tracking work with your digital marketing campaigns.
Use Multiple Phone Numbers to Separate Campaigns
Separating campaigns — also known as segmentation — is one of the best tools in any call tracking toolbox. When you're trying to drive phone calls through numerous sources, you can assign each campaign its own unique phone number, enabling you to see where your calls are coming from. For example, if you're driving phone calls through a direct mail campaign as well as Google search queries, you can assign a separate phone number to each campaign and track the performance of each.
Analyze Calls With Google Analytics
Of course, campaign segmentation is only useful when you have the right data analysis tools to support it. Google Analytics has perhaps the best regarded tools for campaign measurement, according to Business News Daily, and these can be used to draw reams of data that can help you shape your future marketing strategy. You can easily set up and manage the multiple-phone-number segmentation through Google Analytics, which will enable you to observe your campaigns as they unfold. In addition, Google Analytics offers other valuable insights, and these can help you identify the most valuable sources of call referrals and other aspects of your strategy that may require a second look.
Adjust Your Budgets Accordingly
Analytics feedback can also provide you with new insights about how you should adjust your campaign spending. When you first examine your call tracking efforts, you may notice that your spending is inefficient in some areas — perhaps even across the board. But as you gather a large base of data to identify your best campaigns, you adjust your spending accordingly so the largest chunks of your budget go to your highest-return channels.
Meanwhile, you can experiment with your lower-performing channels and make small changes to their delivery or the content surrounding your phone call referrals. If those changes start to yield higher conversion rates, it might be worth increasing your spending to capitalize on that improved ROI.
Overall, call tracking comes down to having the right tools in place to get the job done. For a long time, those tools weren't readily available. Now that they are, marketers not only have the luxury of tracking their phone calls, but they can do it efficiently for great results.
