Call tracking is the practice of seeing where calls to your business have originated from. If implemented correctly, a call tracking strategy can truly pay off big for your marketing investments.

Call tracking can lead to a major improvement in professionalism, call-handling, performance, average call-time, revenue and overall client satisfaction.

You can learn more about your customers, the effectiveness of your campaigns, and the efficiency of your staff with a robust call tracking program.

The bottom line is that call tracking is important to all businesses and the better call tracking strategy you have the better you can stand up against your competitors.

Setting Goals

Goal setting is a part of any marketing strategy, and setting goals around your call tracking efforts should be no different. Based on your marketing investments and campaigns, you should already have goals.

When you implement your call tracking, goals should additionally be set around those metrics and what results you expect to see and which ones may need improvement.

Are you trying to get longer phone calls? Do you have certain information you want your team to find?

Do you have a goal for a campaign to bring in a certain amount of phone calls?

These are all things that you may want to track.

Have a meeting with your team and determine what your goals are and what constitutes success.

Call Tracking Best Practices

Although there are many call tracking software programs that can do it all, in general there are some best practices you and your team should look to implement. After these basic things implemented and done well, look to expand and expect more out of your program. When using your call tracking software, you want to look to:

  • Install Keyword Level Call Tracking – keyword level call tracking will help you understand how many calls were generated from your paid search efforts and help with your overall optimization efforts.
  • Assign a Monetary Value to Each Call – determine what percentage of your calls convert vs. amount you spend. You can assign a value to each call to gauge your overall performance.
  • Compare Call and Click Data – go through your performance reports from Google AdWords as a benchmark for the data with the keyword data. This will help you identify the keywords that are performing and which ones need adjustment.
  • Determine Your Return on Advertisement (Investment) – we all know what ROI is and know that it is a calculation to be determined in the marketing world. You simply will divide your total revenue by the total AdWords cost to get your return on advertising spent for calls.

Align Call Tracking with Marketing Efforts

The days of asking the person on the other line “How did you hear about us?” are gone. It is not customer friendly to ask each caller a series of questions to benefit you or with the purpose of keeping track of marketing campaigns.

You need call tracking to be implemented and aligned with your marketing efforts. Your tracking system should allow you to gather demographic, sales enhancing information, call volume and details about your marketing campaigns and their results.

In order to truly measure and optimize your marketing investments, you will need to set goals and follow some of the best practices of call tracking that I have outlined above. Make sure each marketing initiative has parameters set up and outlined alongside your call tracking strategy.

Final Thoughts

optimizing your marketing investments through call tracking efforts is only one way of doing so. Marketing is nothing if you don’t have goals to reach for or results to learn and better yourself from. Call tracking is one part of those analytic results needed to truly optimize your efforts.

“Vague Plans Provoke Vague Results.” – Author Unknown