Top Inspirational: Internet Marketing Special Tips & Tricks: Call Tracking: A Key Component in Campaign Marketing Analytics

It almost goes without saying that analytics are crucial to developing successful online marketing campaigns. You know all about Kissmetrics, Google Analytics, Google AdWords and everything in between. But even if you’re already tracking all of your online activity, you may still not have a full grasp of lead and conversion data unless you’re also tracking phone calls.

Phone call tracking is the missing piece of the marketing analytics puzzle, allowing marketers to alleviate attribution blind spots and better understand their audience by analyzing which digital and offline marketing tactics are causing customers to pick up the phone and call. By integrating call tracking software, you’ll be able to get a 360-degree view of customer behavior and gain a better sense of how to effectively reach your core audience.

How Call Recording Can Help You Get to Know Your Customer

It’s true that you may already have a decent idea of who your customer is. However, call tracking can offer you additional powerful insights and information on your customer base, allowing you to understand your target audience like never before.

It’s pretty straightforward, but the first and most obvious benefit of call tracking is the ability to listen to your customer firsthand. By recording phone calls, you’re able to determine how effective your customer service is and identify where you could use some improvement, all with the ultimate goal of boosting customer satisfaction and conversion rates. You’ll also be able to better qualify leads and determine which callers require more attention in order to turn them into loyal customers.

In addition, call recording allows you to listen in on your employees and their interactions with leads and customers. By honing in on your sales team’s conversations with callers, you’ll be able to better analyze their tactics and identify areas that require attention to increase conversion rates.

Finally, call recording allows you to get a better idea of where to spend your efforts, whether that’s on your staff, your marketing assets or your product development. Whatever the case may be, recording phone calls can help businesses exceed their own expectations and achieve success.

When Call Tracking Isn’t Best For Your Company

Is there any instance where call recording isn’t beneficial to a business? It’s tough to say, but for smaller businesses just starting out, they may not have the budget or time to implement call recording quite yet. Also digital businesses that primarily rely on the Web for customer conversion and service may not see a great benefit. In all of these cases, free tools such as Google Analytics and AdWords may make more sense before diving into all the features of call analytics software.

Call Tracking and Marketing Campaigns

Beyond call recording, call tracking software offers a variety of impressive features that can give you a clearer picture of the overall success of your marketing strategy. Among these include keyword level tracking, campaign level tracking and multi-channel attribution tracking. These features allow you to examine and analyze each of your campaigns with unparalleled precision in order to see actual correlations between your marketing efforts and results. By gathering such in-depth insights, you’ll be able to better track your individual marketing initiatives and determine which ones are the most successful to your business.

We’ll talk about each of these features separately and how they can help you improve your individual campaigns — and ultimately, your business’s marketing strategy as a whole.

Keyword Level Tracking

Let’s first look at keyword level tracking. This dynamic feature allows you to see which keywords are driving the most phone calls and conversions, which can be exceptionally useful in tracking the success of PPC campaigns. Here’s how it works:

Your business is assigned a pool of phone numbers that are unique to your company.
Whenever a customer finds your business online through a paid ad, they’ll see a specific phone number from that pool the entire time they’re on your website.
When your business receives a phone call, you’ll know firsthand which source and keyword were used.
Once the call is complete, that phone number is freed up for another person to use.

The benefits of keyword level tracking should be clear. By seeing firsthand which keywords are driving calls, you’ll be able to better understand which marketing efforts are working and which ones need to be fine-tuned.

Campaign Level Tracking

Similarly, campaign level tracking allows you to see which marketing campaigns — both online and offline — are driving the most conversions. You’ll be able to view data from your phone calls in your call analytics dashboard, so even if you’ve implemented a non-digital marketing campaign, you can measure its success alongside your online efforts. By analyzing the results of both your digital and offline efforts, you’ll be able to get a better grasp of the success of your overall marketing strategy. You can apply tracking at the campaign level to a variety of efforts, including but not limited to print ads, billboards, TV spots, PPC campaigns and Facebook ads, to better understand which campaigns are resonating with your customer base.

Multi-Channel Attribution Tracking

Most customers interact with your business in more ways than one, but it can oftentimes be difficult to track their exact journey from start to finish. Multi-channel attribution bridges that gap, allowing you to track the entire progress of an online lead and effectively measure which online marketing channels lead to offline telephone call conversions.

To paint a picture of how this works, let’s say you have a lead who first learns about your business through Google AdWords. They click on the ad, browse your website for a bit then go offline for the day. A few days later they remember visiting your website and decide to visit again, this time finding your site by doing a search or directly typing in the URL. They exit your website, and then a few days later pick up the phone after being retargeted through a paid display ad.

Without multi-channel attribution you would only see the first channel a visitor came through, in this case Google AdWords. Call tracking enabled multi-channel attribution provides the ability to view the entire customer lifecycle and effectively measure which online marketing channels lead to offline call conversions. You not only see the first touch point, but the touch point that resulted in a phone call. This data can be used to optimize campaigns and provide proof of successful marketing campaigns that are driving conversions.

While all of these features offer powerful insights to savvy data-driven marketers, it’s important to note that they may not be right for everyone. For business owners who may not be very experienced in analytics, call tracking software might seem like a completely foreign land. And as mentioned before, call analytics may not have great benefit for businesses such as e-commerce companies that drive revenue through clicks and not calls. Be sure to thoroughly weigh your options before integrating call tracking into your marketing strategy.

Call Tracking and Marketing Agencies

Call tracking isn’t just beneficial to individual businesses who really want to hone in on their customer base, but it can be crucial in proving ROI for marketing agencies as well. Call tracking makes it easy for agencies to deliver what clients pay for: proven results. Just like the scenarios outlined above, call tracking enhanced lead attribution capabilities empower agencies to show their clients which campaigns are driving valuable phone calls. Moreover, call tracking can help agencies make smarter marketing decisions, which can lead to a reduction in wasteful ad spending and drive better ROI. Better ROI creates happy clients that stay with an agency for a longer period of time.

Agencies also reap benefits by integrating call tracking software with other software applications that they are already using, such as Kissmetrics. Additionally, the leading call tracking providers offer specific features to help agencies serve their clients. These features include white label solutions to provide a seamless agency brand experience, the ability to handle multiple client companies via a single login, custom client reporting, and view-level access to enable clients to access their call analytics dashboard to view their data and see the results for themselves.

Integrating Call Tracking With Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics has partnered with CallRail to deliver call analytics. Integrating with CallRail alleviates attribution blind spots and allows you to see a more complete picture of how your customers are interacting with your company, not just on your website but also through the telephone. You can track which phone numbers generate more calls and deliver more new customers.

With the CallRail Kissmetrics integration, website activity is automatically associated with a phone call without a person needing to collect any identifying information. CallRail is the only call provider that automatically associates phone calls to web visits to phone calls in Kissmetrics. This works beautifully with Kissmetrics’s person-based analytics approach.

Integrating CallRail with Kissmetrics is simple two-step process. First, go to the Kissmetrics site settings page and copy your Tracking API.

Then head over to CallRail’s Kissmetrics integration page and paste your Kissmetrics API key and click the activate button.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a standalone business or a marketing agency, call tracking provides a variety of powerful features that aid you in tracking the success of your marketing campaigns to ultimately improve ROI. By zeroing-in on customer behavior and data, you’ll be able to gain a better understanding of your target audience and fine-tune your overall marketing strategy to boost conversions.

About the Author: Lance Weatherby has vast sales and marketing experience with both early stage and high growth technology startups. He is currently Vice President of Marketing for CallRail, an Atlanta based marketing technology company focused on call analytics that offers an integration with Kissmetrics. CallRail’s call tracking software is used by more than 30,000 companies and marketing agencies. He can be found on Twitter at @lance.