Call Tracking Will Change Advertising Yet Again

Department store magnate John Wanamaker famously said that half of the money he spent on advertising was wasted, but the problem was that he didn’t know which half. Thankfully, this is no longer a problem for business owners.

The story of tracking advertising effectiveness through online ads is already well known; any business that doesn’t have detailed stats on which online ads work and who comes to them from these ads is using a bad online advertising platform.

What many businesses do not realize, however, especially small businesses, is that it now also is possible to track inbound customer calls and from where they originate. This is a good thing, since Street Fight Mag, a site dedicated to local business, has reported that there has been a spike of roughly 24 percent in inbound call volume within the last year. People are calling businesses more for information.

Tracking calls is possible now thanks to VoIP. When calls were analogue and coming in via copper wires, it was hard to track call origination, but times have changed now that VoIP has made calls digital.

Street Fight Mag paints the picture that should have business managers salivating over the possibilities of VoIP:

“Imagine a phone system that tells business owners, as a call is coming in, where the caller found the business, what web pages they visited leading up to a call, and what email correspondence they’ve had with the business previously,” noted Street Fight Mag. “Imagine this same phone system were able to intelligently route calls based on time-of-day and interactive voice response menus. Now imagine that this same phone system could provision a new local phone number, with all the capabilities mentioned above, within seconds.”

This is the world of cloud-drive VoIP, and it is here today.

Advancements in cloud technology have made full-service call-tracking of phone numbers both affordable and easy.

Modern call tracking platforms can record calls, offer advanced call routing and ship with real-time contextual caller ID right out-of-the-box, and these features will only get better with time. Google has recently announced that it is getting into the space, which invariably will make the technology even cheaper and ever-present.

The ability to track calls is a game-changer, just as tracking online ad effectiveness has changed the game. Many businesses are still using non-VoIP phone solutions, or VoIP solutions that don’t offer call tracking. But this should be changing soon as more firms realize what full-featured VoIP can offer.

Edited by Alisen Downey