Phone call tracking isn't the inefficient headache it was years ago. Thanks to smartphones and built-in click-to-call buttons available through mobile apps and mobile search, the pipeline that funnels referrals to a business phone is easy to observe and analyze.
Many companies recognize how the benefits of call tracking can do wonders for a local establishment, or for any business that relies on person-to-person communication to drive conversions. When implemented correctly, phone call tracking can increase conversion rates while shedding light on the effectiveness of other components of your digital marketing strategy. Here are three key benefits of call tracking any company can enjoy.
Concrete Numbers on Phone Call ROI
When it comes to tracking referrals and conversions from various sources, not every marketing channel can be defined by clear, comprehensive data. That's especially true when it comes to offline marketing channels: Despite some efforts to create tracking opportunities, offline referrals and conversions are often murky and understood through incomplete information.
But in the era of smartphones, phone calls are no longer subject to this mystery. Simple tracking built into click-to-call functionality makes it easy to see when phone calls lead to a referral, and which ones ultimately result in conversions. This gives brands an easy means of understanding the ROI of marketing efforts designed to drive phone calls. When a home improvement store, for example, runs mobile search ads advertising that a certain product is available at a nearby store, the phone calls driven by those ads can easily be tracked, as consumers click the "call" button to reach the store directly.
With more comprehensive data, brands enjoy more transparency regarding their digital marketing and can better grasp how that drives results.
Valuable Contextual Data
Call tracking is about more than just the phone call itself. As Business2Community notes, data related to the phone can be gathered by analytics tools, providing much more context and information about your customers. Rich metadata offers details about location, referral source and even the other content a consumer viewed on your website before making a phone call. That same home improvement store can learn how their ads perform at various distances from the store, and they can see which parts of a retail website are most effective at driving call referrals.
This contextual data is very valuable to analytics efforts, which can build deeper profiles of consumers and better recognize which behaviors are more indicative of a possible sale or conversion.
Improve Your On-Page Content and Keyword Bidding Strategy
With the data gathered from call tracking, marketers can generate insights that go well beyond the phone calls themselves. Phone call referrals from that home improvement website, for example, will indicate which types of content are most effective at driving conversion-minded actions, and which pages are falling short.
For calls generated through online search queries, brands may use tracking data to adjust their valuations of certain keywords, which can help optimize keyword bidding strategy. In the end, phone call tracking provides another valuable data acquisition channel. The benefits extend beyond phone calls to other aspects of your overall marketing presence.
