What Is Call Tracking and How Does It Work

By Matt McGillicuddy
31 Jul 2024

9 min read

Ever come across call tracking before? If you haven't, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a way to monitor what your kids are up to. But actually, call tracking provides a variety of benefits. From helping you create truly impactful marketing campaigns to supercharging your sales strategy and streamlining contact center operations, there's lots on offer.

What is call tracking?

Call tracking is the process of monitoring, managing, and analysing incoming calls to your business. You can use different types of tracking phone numbers across marketing channels to capture the entire customer journey from beginning to end.

By tracking inbound and outbound sales calls, you'll see which marketing activities made your customers pick up the phone. In other words, call tracking joins the dots between the online and offline customer journey.

You can do this manually by assigning distinct numbers to different sources and tracking their incoming calls. Alternatively, call tracking software offers a more precise, scalable, and advanced approach to monitoring call metrics.

What is call tracking software?

An advanced cloud-based analytics platform integrates phone call tracking information with all website visitors' digital activity. This provides businesses with a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey.

So, how does call tracking software work?

A different telephone number is assigned to each unique visitor on the website.
When a visitor calls the unique number their user data is recorded, and call tracking links the call to the visitors' digital activity.
This connection gives you a complete view of the caller’s journey, so you can tell what they've been browsing, what products they're interested in, as well as which campaigns, channels, and keywords made them pick up the phone.

Why use call tracking?

Phone calls remain an important customer touchpoint. Plus, every conversation you have with your customers offers up a goldmine of intel that will help you better understand your audience. When that's the case, it's a ton easier to create harder-hitting messaging and, ultimately, deliver better experiences that keep customers coming back.

It's also important to note that, according to BIA Kelsey, phone calls tend to generate 10-15x more revenue than web leads. To add to that, Forrester reports that 84% of marketers say phone calls have higher conversion rates with larger order value (AOV) compared to other forms of engagement.

So if you're not tracking phone calls, you could be missing out on key insights that'll help you convert more callers to customers.

What are the benefits of call tracking?

If your business receives inbound calls from marketing campaigns, or in general, you need to track them to gain a complete view of your customer journey.

Here's an overview of the benefits of call tracking for different teams:

Call tracking for marketers:

Attribution and ROI measurement:
- Accurately track which marketing campaigns (online or offline) drive phone calls. This means you can eliminate attribution blind spots and nail ROI measurement.
Optimise marketing spend:
- Identify the most effective marketing channels and know where to allocate more budget to generate the highest returns.
Enhanced campaign performance:
- Measure the success of different marketing strategies and make data-driven decisions to enhance campaign performance.
Improved customer insights:
- Gain insights into customer behaviour and preferences by analysing call data, leading to more targeted and effective marketing efforts.
A/B testing:
- Run A/B tests on different marketing messages or channels to determine which ones drive the most calls and conversions.

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Call tracking for sales teams:

Lead tracking and management:
- Accurately track lead source and manage them more effectively, ensuring sales teams follow up quickly with the right approach.
Sales performance analysis:
- Monitor sales team performance by analysing call data, including call duration, call outcomes, and conversion rates.
Enhanced lead quality:
- Identify high-quality leads based on the source and type of call. this enables sales teams to prioritise their efforts on higher-intent callers.
Personalised sales approach:
- Use call data to understand customer needs and preferences, which creates a more personalised and effective sales approach.
Sales training and development:
- Record calls for training purposes, helping quickly identify areas for improvement and providing real-life examples for training sessions.

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Call tracking for contact centres:

Improved customer service:
- Track call quality and customer interactions to ensure high standards of customer service and identify areas for improvement.
Operational efficiency:
- Monitor call volumes, peak times, and call handling times to optimise staffing and operational efficiency.
Performance metrics and reporting:
- Generate detailed reports on call tracking metrics, including call duration, hold times, and resolution rates to assess and improve contact centre performance.
Agent performance management:
- Evaluate agent performance based on call data, providing a basis for feedback, incentives, and performance improvement plans.
Customer experience insights:
- Analyse call recordings and data to gain insights into customer pain points and preferences, leading to better customer experience management.

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Overall Benefits:

Enhanced analytics:
- Gain comprehensive analytics on call activities, integrating with other data sources to provide a holistic view of marketing, sales, and customer service performance.
Data-Driven Decision Making:
- Utilise call tracking data to make informed, data-driven decisions across marketing, sales, and contact centre operations.
Increased accountability:
- Hold teams accountable for their performance by tracking and analysing call data, leading to continuous improvement.

All in all, businesses that integrate call tracking into their tech stack will gain crucial insights that will improve the effectiveness of marketing, sales, and contact centre operations.

What are the different types of call tracking?

There are a few different types of call tracking that will give you more or less visibility, depending on your needs.

Some types of call tracking are more advanced than others. These are basic, campaign level, session level, and visitor level.

Basic call tracking – One phone number is allocated to a source, typically one number per channel. This shows you where a call came from but can’t provide further insights or help you see ROI.
Campaign level – This is similar to the basic call tracking model, but more numbers are used and are assigned to each campaign you run.
Session level – A unique call tracking number is assigned to a user for the length of their browsing session. While this can be useful, it doesn’t help you identify the full customer journey.
Visitor level – Capture all interactions with your site across all visits (including sources, keywords, and channels) that occur before a visitor picks up the phone. Call tracking software such as Infinity can give you the full picture of the customer journey.

How to use fixed numbers for call tracking

Fixed numbers are used in offline marketing campaigns such as radio ads, posters, business cards, stationery, billboards, catalogues and any piece of activity where a phone number can be featured but not connected to an online marketing journey.

Fixed numbers still provide usable data but are not as comprehensive as dynamic call tracking numbers. While fixed numbers and offline call tracking can’t provide as much insight as dynamic numbers, they still have many call tracking benefits.

For example, it is useful for seeing which other activities are generating calls and having that recorded in your call tracking analytics platform, which can help you be smarter with your marketing budget.

How are dynamic numbers used for call tracking?

Dynamic numbers are uniquely generated trackable telephone numbers specifically to each website visitor for marketing and operations purposes.

Each trackable phone number will then provide data on individual customer journeys and which source, ranging from PPC, SEO and more, the customer originated from.

Visitor level call tracking requires a pool of tracking numbers that can be used to allocate to each visitor that comes to the website. Tracking pools are dedicated to each website and client so that all calls are guaranteed to connect through to the clients call centre or office.

Using this approach, Infinity can track millions of keywords using only hundreds or thousands of phone numbers, and still provide detailed unique insights on your customers.

What about Infinity’s call tracking?

Infinity’s call tracking software is designed to help you extract sophisticated insights and make every moment matter for your business. It can supercharge call centre performance by providing real-time data on where calls are coming from, to better understand where and why customers pick up the phone.

If you can pinpoint the action that triggers customer calls, you can tailor scripts using high-quality transcripts and deliver call centre agent training that will drive more successful outcomes.

When you pair phone call tracking with Infinity’s speech analytics suite, Conversation Analytics, you can take things to the next level. With both solutions, you can get the insights you need to map your customer journey, improve customer service and streamline operations.

More importantly, this detailed intel into customer conversations can be used to improve AHT and reduce pressure on your call centre teams by deflecting calls efficiently.