If you want to know which marketing activity is most effective for your business; providing high-quality leads and attaining the greatest ROI, then you’ll want to consider investing in call tracking software.
Call tracking allows you to gain insights into your potential customers and campaigns in a way that online analytical programmes simply cannot. According to analytics software provider, Mediahawk:
“Call tracking gives you a complete view of your marketing performance.”
Or perhaps you have already implemented a call tracking system, but are unsure on which metrics to track – or want to fully understand which can transform your campaigns and strategies.
Read on, as we explain what call tracking metrics are, and what you need to pay attention to when studying reports.
What are call tracking metrics?
In short, call tracking metrics measure data from your incoming calls and allow you to find out the following information:
Which should I focus on?
Of course, all insights are important, and combined, will provide a holistic picture of not only your customer experience, but how to grow revenue and reduce wasted spend.
Here are our top 5 most important metrics:
Not only will this metric prove which ads and campaigns are driving inbound calls, it will also give you useful insights into call patterns. Knowing this information is crucial, allowing you to focus your efforts on the channels that are most effective.
One way of doing this is to use dynamic numbers. Dynamic numbers, as opposed to static numbers, have several benefits. First, you’ll need to add some javascript code to your website. Then, dynamic numbers will allow you to track the sources which are responsible for generating the most calls – as well as the pages that those callers have visited and their online behaviour. You can also track the performance of each campaign.
While it’s crucial for your sales team to nurture your existing leads, first time callers represent another exciting prospect. Therefore, it’s hugely important to track where these new prospects are calling from.
You may notice patterns in your marketing activity, such as the performance of specific campaigns or strategies, and you’ll want to bear this in mind for future business decisions. Not only will this provide insights on which pages are performing most effectively and bringing in new leads, but also which are less effective and need improvement, or optimising.
While this can link to our previous point – note that it’s likely a new customer will be on the phone for longer – not all calls have equal value. You could take 30 calls in a day, but it’s likely that these will be short conversations and won’t prove valuable in the grand scheme of things.
Of course, you’re looking for quality over quantity, and those longer, more meaningful conversations which represent a high-quality lead. Again, you can use call tracking metrics to determine which activity is providing these longer – and more effective – calls.
We’ve already mentioned effectiveness. But monitoring your VCR is much more than that.
Take a look at this example:
You might have a particular source which is producing a lower-than-average amount of traffic, but higher-than-average cost per visitor. With that in mind, you might consider cutting the budget for that source. But what if you could then see thatthe source in question was producing more calls? Clearly, this channel brings value and it would be foolish to neglect it.
That’s where VCR is crucial. It identifies the sources that generate phone leads, as opposed to solely traffic.
When visitors land on your website, they are usually met with two (sometimes, three) options:
Without call tracking, your PPC conversion rate will seem lower than it actually is. This is because it will only gather data related to online activity, i.e., the contact form and chat bot. By utilising call tracking software, you can combine those insights with the data from phone calls too.
There are so many data points you need to be tracking, and while the above isn’t an exhaustive list, it’s a good starting point. Using call tracking software is the best way of getting all the information you need to see which campaigns generate leads and are an effective use of your time and budget.
