Does Your Business Need Call Tracking?

By Emma Moody, 20th February 2018

For most online businesses, there are two main ways to receive an inbound lead: a contact form enquiry from the website or phone call. However our experience as an agency has shown us that while almost 100% of our new customers track their contact form enquiries online, fewer than 5% track their inbound calls. So why is this? Well, call tracking is one of those technologies that people usually don’t realise is relevant to them. Many of our new customers report feeling that their business is too small to be tracking calls and that the costs outweigh the benefits, especially when contact form tracking is free.

As advocates of call tracking, even in small businesses, Plug & Play believe that the insight gained by tracking all inbound leads by far outweighs the monthly fee. By the end of this article, you’ll be armed with all of the information you need to make a decision on whether call tracking is for you and your company.

So first thing’s first… what is call tracking?

Call tracking can get complicated and can be quite tricky to get your head around at first. Put simply, call tracking uses a variety of different phone numbers that appear in different places, to different people. This tells us who calls, when they call and from where. Depending on which number is fired, we can gain insight into the customer journey before they picked up the phone.

So why should you be tracking inbound calls?

1) To Get To Grips With Your Numbers

By tracking all inbound leads, your company can put a figure on the lead generation of your website. Consequently, a figure can also be placed against the value of your website. This essentially involves attributing revenue to your leads then calculating the total revenue that your website generates. This can also be done for any offline sales leads.

2) To Tackle Your Marketing Spend

Do you ever think that your online customer acquisition cost is a little high? Are you worried about investing in marketing because you struggle to see a return? Without measuring the full number of calls that your website generates, your customer acquisition cost may appear higher than it actually is because you’re not attributing all customers to the correct lead source. By taking all web generated leads into account, you gain a greater understanding of how much money each lead has cost you. As these costs come from real data, there is no estimating involved. You know exactly what each lead cost you and the margin that you made on it. This can then be used to finalise your marketing spend for the next quarter, setting a budget in line with acquisition costs and keeping profitability at its peak.

3) To Learn How Your Customers Contact You

If you’re not sure how your customers prefer to contact you then don’t panic; you’re not alone. However with BIA Kelsey finding that inbound call leads are 10 – 15 times more likely to convert than a lead from a contact form enquiry, the real question here is ‘how are you going to find out?’ Research strongly suggests that calls are the most valuable lead type and if you’re not tracking your calls, you’re not attributing these valuable leads to your web performance. It’s important to remember that each industry is different so why not test your own data to see how your customers prefer to reach out to you.

4) To Refine Your Sales Process

Most call tracking software also provides the ability to play back recent sales calls. This is a great way to review the call handling process and keep it up to date based on common customer requests and feedback.

5) To Dig For Keywords

Google is the boss when it comes to ranking algorithms, tracking and monitoring. However Google Search Console regularly withholds keyword information. All marketeers are familiar with the dreaded ‘not set’ or ‘other’ label sitting at the top of their queries and often accounting for a significant chunk of your search data. Some call answering services provide additional search query data for both organic and paid searches, giving you an edge on your competitors.

6) To Optimise Your Pages

In addition to gaining insight into the queries and campaigns that are most successful at driving calls, you can also learn about which pages on your website convert the most customers into leads. This data can be used in your campaigns to direct customers to the top performing pages while poorer performing pages undergo conversion rate optimisation.

7) To Work To Your Customer’s Clock

As call tracking logs all of your calls, you can get a feel for the time of day that your customers want to speak to you. As much as it feels like the phone always rings at 9am before you’ve grabbed a coffee or at 5.30pm when you’ve got one foot out of the door, find out the real data and respond accordingly. If your customers regularly try to call out of hours and their calls aren’t connected, you can use your average conversion rate and customer acquisition cost to calculate whether it’s viable to have a sales rep on hand until 7pm.

If you’d like to find out more about call tracking or working out your customer acquisition cost, contact Plug & Play