Workshop Digital is an award-winning digital marketing agency specializing in SEO and PPC for small, medium, and enterprise businesses. We spoke with Morgan Jarvis, a Paid Digital Marketer at Workshop Digital, about how the CallRail’s call and form tracking has given both them and their clients a better view into their customers journeys and where to prioritize their marketing efforts.
1. Tell us a little about Workshop Digital
We are a full service digital marketing agency based in Richmond, Virginia, that serves a variety of client sizes and industries. We have a lot of lead generation clients, but we also have some e-commerce. Our main client services teams are a paid digital marketing team that does paid digital advertising across search, social media, getting into like some programmatic stuff as well, and display and then we have our search engine optimization team that’s more responsible for organic rankings and overall website health. We also have a small design department that we leverage on the paid side mostly for display creative and things like that. We’re about 30 people right now.
2. What did analytics tracking for forms and calls look like before you started using CallRail?
Before we started using CallRail, we were using call tracking through another vendor. It was Marchex actually. At the time, Marchex didn’t offer any keyword level data associated with phone calls so the best that we could see was campaign level data.
When we moved to CallRail, it gave us the ability to tie leads more directly to the account areas that were driving those leads. We’re now able to see which keywords, ads, and campaigns drove phone calls and use that data to improve performance on the accounts.
3. If you think about the data that you know got added to your suite of intelligence, how did that change how you are able to help your customers?
It allowed us to make smarter optimizations because we had deeper insight on what was effective within our advertising campaigns. One example would be for some of our auto clients being able to see which makes and models of vehicles were bringing in calls, whether it was new or used inventory, and how many calls were coming in for the service department versus other areas.
For other industries, like dentistry, it’s been really helpful in determining not only what areas of the account are driving phone calls, but what areas that account are driving new patients or existing patients. They were using the call tagging features to tag each call which is either new or existing so allowed us to see effectiveness in that way as well. So really like call quality, I would say that they’re qualified leads, you know, new customers for the business, that type of thing. We’ve been able to determine some of that with our clients using the call recording.
4. Can you talk a little bit more about why it was important for you guys to be able to report on that data to your customer and what it helped you achieve with them?
One thing is that it allowed us to further prove the value of the advertising campaign. Having that data allowed us to see what is effective within the account. And then with getting the clients involved, we’re also able to do some tracking from the phone call all the way to a person becoming a customer or a sale. Being able to connect the dots that way in order to prove value, I would say is a big area of help.
From a form’s point of view, it also really gives us information on lead quality by being able to look at the submission details, if there’s things in there that can determine how good of a lead that person is.
This is really effective for one of our dentistry clients because they have people indicate whether they are a new or returning client in the form. So we’re able to use that along with the auto tagging feature to actually immediately tag each form submission that comes from a new customer. It’s allowing us to report only on leads that are bringing in new business for the client, which is what they’re really concerned with. Being able to see how effective the campaigns are at a granular level and what areas of the campaigns are driving in these qualified or less qualified leads, this is the true value.
5. What does using CallRail look like in your day to day activity or even in your workflow? At what point does it become an important tool for you guys for each customer?
We consider CallRail whenever we take on a new client who is interested in tracking their phone calls. Most lead generation clients have an interest in tracking their phone calls and a lot of service based clients also need to track their phone calls such as dentists, car dealerships, things of that nature. We always consider it when we’re taking on an account in order to set up that tracking, because those typically are a part of our key performance indicator goals for accounts.
6. Why couldn’t you do some of this stuff with just Google Analytics as data?
On the call side, there is no Google Analytics based call tracking. There are some Google Ads call tracking solutions, but they’re not providing full visibility in our call tracking solution that we were using and integrating with Google Analytics just didn’t give us as deep of data.
On the forms side of things, the new form tracking feature allows us to create forms easily for clients that might not have another form solution. That’s one big side of it. And then the other side of it is being able to have that form data within CallRail itself. I think there is an integration with analytics, but I actually wouldn’t focus on that for us because we’re typically tracking that through other means, but just using the additional data that it provides within the CallRail platform as a deeper analysis portion.
7. What CallRail integrations are you using and how are you merging the data?
We integrate CallRail with our Google Ads accounts and our Bing Ads accounts in order to get the phone call data fed back into those accounts to make easier optimization decisions. We also typically will integrate CallRail with our Google Analytics accounts if the client is interested in seeing that phone call data within Google Analytics as well. We then also use an integration with our reporting platform NinjaCat in order to easily report on phone call data.
8. I’ve heard that you also had some clients who switched over to CallRail after hearing about it from you guys.
Yes, I have one that comes to mind that had been using Marchex internally for years that we just got them over to CallRail. So we actually recommended any client that was using Marchex through us to move over. We did a bit of a mass transition to CallRail, but with clients that were doing internal call tracking, we have had some conversations about whether or not CallRail could be a better fit for them.
9. Do you also have clients actively going in it or do they just install it and let you run it?
We have a mixture of both. We try to encourage client involvement and that has definitely increased since moving call tracking providers because it is more user friendly. We try to get clients involved in listening to call recordings and tagging calls based on quality since they’ve got great insight on what a truly qualified lead would be.
To encourage our clients to go in and look into the data themselves, I will actually set up a walkthrough with them where I’ll do a screen share and poke around their CallRail account and show them all of the features that are available, things that I think that they should be using. I’ve had the most success with that by far. I think people are a little bit intimidated to even like login to a new platform, but giving a walkthrough of the application eases those initial feelings once they realize how self explanatory things are.
10. How has form tracking changed the workflow since you’ve been able to use CallRail?
On our end, we’ve actually been using it to create forms for the client rather than packing the existing forms. We had a few situations so far where in one, the client was launching a new site and was looking for another form solution.
And the other, the client was moving away from HubSpot and was looking for something to replace the forms that they had through there. So CallRail offered a really easy solution to create those forms and then have the tracking going through CallRail and analytics as well.
11. What makes you stick with CallRail?
The interface is extremely user friendly. My experience with their support has always been top notch. Our customer success manager, Tameka, is amazing. She’s super responsive and always finds the answers to our questions when we may have them. It’s honestly made our jobs easier as digital marketing analysts in terms of driving improvements and results for our client accounts or you can say optimizing client accounts.
For one of our clients in the financial industry, seeing all of the data in one place has been crucial for them. They were actually already using CallRail for all of their call tracking and now that we’ve layered form tracking into the mix, it gives them a central place to see all of the lead details. It’s great to have clients so involved and interested in seeing the timeline of the user’s journey and to have all of that information at their fingertips.
On our end, it’s really neat to be able to do the forms search feature. We are using that for this client in particular, they have checkbox options on the form for people to self identify whether they’re looking for a B2B or B2C angle. We have some issues with people coming in that are looking for B2C when it’s really a B2B product, so that allows us to like quickly search for that and see what areas of the account are driving in these really good B2B leads versus what’s having some B2C sneak in that we could kind of move away from. Having the search submission feature has been really helpful in saving time.
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