One of the most important features of call tracking is its ability to illuminate offline marketing and customer activity. This is made possible by the wealth of data points that are accessible only when you’re using software that can generate call tracking metrics from each inbound call.
These metrics can provide valuable insights to improve your digital and offline marketing, your customer service, and your ability to drive better ROI from sales and marketing activities.
Before you can take advantage of this opportunity, you need to understand the call tracking metrics that offer the greatest insights into overall performance. These eight metrics deserve close attention from any agency.
1. Overall call volume
On its own, call volume is a general data point that often requires greater context to deliver meaningful insights for your clients. But it’s a fundamental metric that you’ll want to pay attention to, especially if you’re undertaking efforts to increase inbound phone calls for your clients.
Call tracking software is also able to tally the calls your clients miss when they’re busy or out of the office. Caller ID can be used to do this manually, but call tracking solutions are able to contextualize this volume by tracking many other data points to help you figure out what other factors might affect call volume — either overall or at particular times during the day.
2. Call duration
Call volume tells you how many calls your clients receive, but it doesn’t tell you what goes on within those calls — or how valuable each call is. To answer those questions, you’ll want to have data regarding your clients’ average call duration.
Generally speaking, longer calls represent an interaction with someone who has a high buying intent, or is already an existing customer calling with a question or issue. These calls offer more value to your clients because they indicate a greater potential for future sales than calls that are long enough for only a few quick exchanges between the caller and call recipient.
This is especially true if your clients’ inbound calls are being routed to sales teams. Most consumers don’t want to waste their time talking to a salesperson when they aren’t interested in making a purchase. You can look at call duration numbers and make a reasonable assumption that longer calls feature conversations that are moving leads further down the conversion funnel — regardless of whether or not they end up making a purchase.
3. Referral source
If you want to understand your marketing campaign’s performance, then it’s crucial that you track the referral source for each incoming call. This helps your agency attribute ROI to each channel for your clients — even when the referral source is offline.
In direct mailings and other offline content, it’s easy to track calls to their referral source by giving unique phone numbers to each campaign: printing one number on a direct mailing, another phone number on a print advertisement, and so forth — even if they’re ultimately routed to the same place.
This approach is a bit trickier in digital campaigns, but it’s easy to do with a call tracking solution. You can use dynamic number insertion to create as many numbers as you need to display on your clients’ website, landing pages, email newsletters, and other online properties.
WIth DNI, you can track phone call referral sources to individual marketing campaigns — and these numbers can be utilized without affecting SEO or creating confusion among search engines over your clients’ primary business phone number.
4. Call type
Businesses will want to know what types of calls are being executed by their customers. Even if they know which marketing campaign prompted a call, it helps to know whether the call was made via mobile click-to-call buttons, Google My Business listings, manual number entry, or other actions.
Similarly, you can segment according to the type of referral source to get a macro view of your clients’ success in certain aspects of their marketing strategy. If they’re driving great paid phone call rates but struggling to drive calls via organic or social channels, for example, there may be weak points in their strategy that need to be addressed.
5. Percentage of first-time callers
If you want a client’s business to grow — and who doesn’t? — then you need to keep expanding their customer base by making new connections outside their existing audience. These new customer opportunities are represented by first-time callers to your client.
It’s worth segmenting your client’s audience and comparing performance metrics for first-time callers as compared to repeat callers or existing customers. Call duration, referral source, and other data points might reveal different trends among first-time callers that your clients can use to improve their engagement strategies, conversion rates, and overall sales and marketing ROI.
6. Time and date information
When are callers reaching out to your clients? Collecting data on time and date trends can help you optimize phone availability and response times on the customer-facing end of things.
Meanwhile, this information can improve your bidding strategy for PPC campaigns, optimizing your spending to drive better ROI.
If your client is an office electronics supplier, for example, then they’re probably not getting many serious inquiries outside regular 9-to-5 business hours. Spending on PPC campaigns in the evening and on weekends doesn’t make sense.
This insight on its own might not be revelatory for your client. But time and date information might reveal less obvious trends, such as peak inbound calls — and longer call durations — cropping up Tuesday mornings. With this information, your client could increase PPC spending during this time frame and make sure staff are available to answer the phone when these high-value calls come in.
Or, at the very least, they’ll know to return those calls as quickly as possible, because they represent the best odds of a sale.
7. Landing page performance
Landing pages are designed to drive an action from a targeted, qualified lead. This action typically comes in the form of making an immediate purchase, filling out a form, or calling the company directly.
But without call tracking software in place, phone calls offer much less value to your clients, because they generate no data points and don’t aid your clients’ engagement with those customers.
Even more importantly, when phone calls aren’t tracked as an action resulting from a landing page visit, they can’t be credited to the performance of that landing page and the marketing campaign that drove the landing page referral in the first place.
This creates blind spots in your marketing attribution that will impact ROI measurement and marketing efficacy.
8. Keyword attribution
Depending on the referral source and each customer’s overall interactions with your clients’ marketing content, keyword attribution may not be applicable to each inbound phone call.
But when calls are driven by paid search ads, search-driven website visits, or any other marketing channels that use search keywords to find an audience, you’ll want to be able to attribute those keywords within your call tracking solution.
Like any other aspect of your clients’ marketing strategy, these keyword insights can be used to help you fine-tune your keyword usage based on what’s most effective for driving inbound calls.
Attributing your inbound calls to specific keywords used to find your business online has always been valuable for businesses relying on inbound traffic — but it wasn’t possible before call tracking software made attribution possible.
Conclusion
Call tracking isn’t just another way to slice and dice the data your clients are already drowning in. It’s an outlet to completely new information and insights that can help them see their own strengths and weaknesses like never before.
And although call tracking’s insights primarily serve the function of phone calls within a business, the strategy implications of this data can stretch throughout the organization.
>> Check out our guide: Learn how to track calls like clicks and earn better results for your clients.
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