Are you tracking results from all the marketing campaigns you have initiated? Like most people, you are probably tracking some but not all your campaigns. You might be tracking things such as page views, social media followers, email subscribers, and so on. However, sales do not only result from online marketing activities.
If you advertise your business on a newspaper, how can you track the ROI from your ad spend?
The answer lies in call tracking.
What Is Call Tracking?
Call tracking is a way of tracking the number of leads generated through phone calls from an online or offline campaign. For example, you can track calls coming from ads placed on a newspaper or flier to determine the success of the marketing campaigns.
How Does Call Tracking Work?
When customers see the phone number on the ad, they’ll call your business. But how will you know that they called because they saw the particular AdWords ad you set up?
The solution is call tracking.
To get started with call tracking, you’ll need a call tracking software to record details about the calls made. By monitoring the calls made to specific numbers, you will know which campaigns are generating the most leads and which ones are draining your dollars without a great ROI.
What Are the Benefits of Call Tracking?
Call tracking and analytics help you monitor which areas of marketing are performing and which areas need some improvement. Call tracking works well in the following areas:
- Organic Search Engine Traffic – You can determine the landing pages which are generating calls to your business.
- Pay-Per-Click Campaigns – You can check which keywords are performing well.
- Digital Adverting Campaigns – You can see which campaigns are performing by using a different phone number on each ad campaign.
Through call tracking, you can uncover the following:
- The time when a call was made
- The marketing channels that are generating the most calls
- The customer service team’s response to the calls, etc.
This information helps you to identify the best performing campaigns. For instance, let’s imagine you place ads on:
- Sunday newspaper
- Weekday papers
If you find that most calls are coming from ads placed on the Sunday newspaper than those placed on weekday papers, then you can scale back on weekday advertising and increase the ad spend for the Sunday paper.
Call tracking helps you know the performance of every marketing channel you are using. For example, if you were to run three marketing campaigns:
- Online pay-per-click campaign
- Ads on a local newspaper
- Printing fliers
By using call tracking software, you can compare results from all these marketing channels.
| Campaign | Cost | Number of Calls |
| Online pay-per-click campaign | $1000 | 10 |
| Ads on a local newspaper | $500 | 3 |
| Printing fliers | $1500 | 0 |
This table shows that the fliers that you’ve been printing are not generating any calls. In that case, reduce or stop spending on flier marketing and redirect your spending into the pay-per-click campaign where you can get more inquiries.
Why You Should Use Call Tracking
Many businesses are still not monitoring all their marketing channels and so are missing out on leads. Call tracking service is something you should not ignore. Call tracking provides accurate data about your marketing efforts. In the above instance, it was clear that there was wasted budget upon printing fliers which were not generating any inquiries. Pay-per-click was generating more leads, so more of the budget should be allocated to it. Tracking calls across all marketing channels can save you time and money.
How Does Call Tracking Help in Maximizing ROI?
Call analytics and tracking provide a lot of data, which you can interpret and use to optimize your campaigns for the best ROI while keeping costs low. For example, if you see that most AdWords campaigns calls are coming in the afternoon, you can tweak the ads campaigns to be shown from noon. This means your budget will not be wasted during the morning hours.
Call tracking is a critical marketing aspect for all types of businesses. Through call tracking software, you can identify metrics that will help you get the best ROI for your ad spend.
