Call Accounting Featured Article

Why Call Tracking Matters

  By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC

Figuring out which keywords and marketing efforts are driving inbound calls can be challenging in our multichannel world. But organizations that take the time to do their homework in this subject may find they can significantly lower their costs and optimize their spending. And call tracking software can be the key to do that.

Tools like Google (News - Alert) Analytics offer insights about visitor behaviors on online. But they don’t address what’s happening with calls, even calls that occur after a customer sees your number on a website. Call tracking software allows organizations to get granular information on callers and campaigns. Plus, the software allows businesses to use different phone numbers for different campaigns or to reflect different customer journeys that led them to make a call.

Here’s how it works. Organizations implement JavaScript on their websites to track how people get to the site. They can use one number for callers who clicked on a paid search ad, another for those that clicked on an SEO listing, and a different number for others. Call tracking software can also reveal which keywords generate calls.

That’s the kind of information that can inform your online spending. Reports suggest call tracking software users realize an average of 30 percent lower costs – with the same business results – for pay-per-click efforts. And at least one call reporting software user lowered its acquisition costs by 600 percent.

Call tracking is more important now than ever. That’s because calls resulting from online ads are on the rise, and because calls tends to produce higher quality leads than other channels and have higher conversion rates.

One report indicates U.S. business calls from digital ads are expected to grow 110 percent between 2014 and next year. And reports indicate that calls convert 10 to 15 times more often than web leads.