For marketers, it is a constant daily battle to get as much information about your users’ journey and attribute it all. Over the years, tracking your users’ online journey has gotten better but there is still often a disconnect — when your customer calls in, that data goes immediately offline. Enter call tracking… Call tracking is a clever service that continues your users’ data and tracks a phone call as any other event in your Google Analytics (GA) or Google Adwords (GAds), Hubspot, etc.(many other integrations also exist) giving you full lead data and insights. It’s become a foundational technology in any martech stack and I’ve helped clients obtain these same insights. My recommended call tracking provider is Callrail but I also have experience implementing Infinity and ResponseTap for our clients.
How it works
When setting up, your call tracking provider will give you a little snippet of code that we can add to your site or you can add to Google Tag Manager (GTM). This snippet will do a find and replace and swap out your numbers for a new number. I’ve found Callrail’s snippet to be super simple to implement and it finds the numbers straight away. With other call tracking providers, there may be a bit of extra developer support needed to add some specialist code around each number. When you receive a call to your new swapped number, the system picks up that phone call and captures the details of the users’ visit while routing it to the original number. Using the integrations from the call tracking provider, we can then set up the automation to send call information to your marketing analytics platforms.
Voilà your offline phone data is captured!
Setup
The configuration of Callrail is quite simple once you get the hang of it. In your call tracking dashboard, the phone numbers that are currently listed on your site need to be added. At this point, you will be prompted with two options either create a pool or a single tracking number which is where you as a marketer need to decide what is best for that particular phone number. A single tracking number is great when all that you need is to know if someone called a number and who that person is. A pool on the other hand is a set of different regionalised phone numbers that swap out based on individual users. Your developer can work with you to figure out exactly how big the pool needs to be. With a pool of numbers, you get much more information such as referral information, PPC campaign data, and the users' website browsing history before calling. Typically, we recommend using a pool unless the number is for a print campaign, a specific salesperson’s number or a specific campaign landing page. Simply put, use a single number only if you don’t care how they got where they are, just that they got where they are, otherwise use pools.Delving deeper
There are some added optional but super handy features I’ve found very useful that you might like.
Call flows — replaces your expensive IVR
Whispers — you can turn on a “whisper” to say in your salesperson’s headset where the call has come from and if it’s from a specific campaign.
Keypad scoring — your sales team can rate the quality of the phone leads from their keypad.
Keyword spotting — This is super cool and by far my favourite! Using a transcription of your call you can configure the system to pick up on positive and negative keywords in the call to tag and lead score. Married up with website data you can start to gain a very good picture if your PPC or SEO efforts are leading to good quality phone leads or if your support teams are bogged down by common questions and perhaps you need to improve FAQs on your site.
Integrations
Callrail provides some extremely helpful integrations. Using the data you’ve collected, the call tracking software can send to your analytics suite, PPC ads, and CRMs such as Hubspot and Salesforce. These integrations can be configured so that events are only sent if specific criteria are met (such as length of the call or lead score). It also works natively with Slack so you can keep your notifications in one place — more info here.Call tracking has a been great addition to the martech stack and attribution plus it’s all GDPR compliant.