What is call tracking and why should marketers use it?

The digital revolution has brought many benefits for businesses and consumers alike. At the same time, it’s also added a level of complexity to the customer journey. Customers can engage with brands across a variety of touchpoints, from the above-the-line activity that grabbed their attention on their way to work to paid search and Facebook ads that pop up in the consideration phase.

This leads to blind spots in our data, particularly if your business relies on phone calls to make the final sale. Furthermore, calls remain as important as they’ve ever been, with approximately 92% of customer interactions occurring over the phone.

So, how can you connect online activity with offline conversion? Call tracking is the answer. Call tracking is the first step to gaining clarity from conversations with your customers that can increase revenue, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience.

In this blog, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about call tracking, from what it is and how call tracking software works to how call tracking can amplify your campaigns.

What is call tracking?

Call tracking is the process of linking 'offline' phone calls to 'online' customer journeys. By tracking calls, both inbound and outbound, you’ll be able to see which channels, keywords or tactics persuaded that person to pick up the phone.

Call tracking can be done manually by asking customers on the phone, setting up specific numbers for specific sources and counting them as they come in, or by using call tracking software, which can do these tasks more accurately and efficiently - at scale.

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How does call tracking software work?

Traditionally, the way call tracking works is by applying unique phone numbers to marketing campaigns. But modern call tracking recognizes that customer journeys are complex and multiple touchpoints influence consideration, research, and buying phases.

Connecting offline interactions with the online customer journey is tricky and will require you to have call tracking software in place. With call tracking software, individual visitors to your website are given a unique phone number to call. This data can then be matched to each touchpoint on the customer journey, and the data passed to your CRM software.

With Infinity, call tracking is as simple as one-two-three:

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

Essentially, call tracking merges phone call data with the visitor’s digital activity, giving you the full picture of the customer journey and enabling you to make smarter decisions.

What are the different types of call tracking?

There are a few different types of call tracking that can give you more or less visibility, depending on your needs. As you can probably imagine, some types of call tracking are more sophisticated 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. This is commonly used for offline sources or external websites where you cannot change the code.
• Campaign level call tracking – This is similar to the basic call tracking model, but more numbers are used and are assigned to each campaign you run.
• Session level call tracking – 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 call tracking – 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.

In addition to these different types of call tracking, you can also make use of dynamic numbers and fixed numbers. These allow you to better connect the online and offline journey, from your PPC campaigns to out-of-home activity, and unlock granular insights that can be used to drive performance improvements and improve the customer experience.

What are the benefits of call tracking?

Call tracking can enhance your business by providing you with rich, customer-centric data that can be applied across the business. If you receive inbound calls from marketing campaigns, or in general, you need to be tracking them in order to gain a complete view of your customer journey. Call tracking benefits include:

• Capture data and insights needed to build smooth customer journeys
• Understand the campaigns, channels and keywords that are more likely to drive conversions
• Monitor, record and assign value to call outcomes in real time
• Evolve your marketing and sales tactics based on real customer data
• Identify pain points that can be solved before they even occur
• Tap into conversational trends
• Minimise support calls by understanding where FAQs can be improved

How does call tracking improve marketing campaigns?

Call tracking software helps your marketing team connect the dots by clearly linking campaigns, channels, and keywords to incoming calls and customers. By being able to see the full picture of the customer journey, you’re in a better position to make data-driven decisions and invest your campaign budgets in the activities that drive real revenue.

According to a recent report, 91% of marketers are expecting to invest even more in Martech next year. Using Infinity's call tracking and Google Analytics together helps you make continuously smarter decisions.

Infinity seamlessly integrates call data into Google, giving you a more complete picture of the customer journey. See the source or medium that led to the phone call, individual keywords, performance of different website pages and which pages customers called you from and provide key demographics about your customers where available. Benefits include reduced cost-per-click (CPC) on paid search, reduced cost-per-acquisition (CPA), and increases in return on ad spend (ROAS).

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Plus, Infinity’s Google Ads integration is stronger than ever. Marketers can capture granular insights on the keyword groups, ads and campaigns that trigger calls directly from Search Ads. One of our clients had found that over 15% of their calls were coming from fixed numbers directly from the search results page in Google. They can now see these calls as conversions in Google Ads along with insight on what activity led to the calls. Armed with this knowledge, their search agency can make decisions that help them:

• Connect with more customers
• Focus budget on campaigns driving desired results
• Connect revenue to ad spend more accurately
• Better understand the buyer journeys their customers choose to take

How are real businesses using call tracking software to improve marketing campaigns?

A great example comes from Vodafone. Many of their broadband sales came over the phone, but they were unable to see what led to each call. Additionally, with so many calls coming in each day, they found it difficult to catalogue the type of calls and where they are coming from to assign calls to the correct affiliate channel.

By tracking the journey that led to each call, they were able to see which affiliates were generating calls, helping them to make smarter decisions around which partners to focus on.

Furthermore, using Conversation Analytics’ Keyword Spotting feature, they were able to highlight calls where a speaker said terms that indicate a sale, as well as other useful terms such as competitors, products, or new/existing customers. This gave them rich data that informed their strategy and allowed them to accurately connect sales calls to affiliate channels and partners. Within six months, they were able to attribute over 17,000 sales and they identified a 7.5% conversion rate from call-to-purchase (significantly higher than their other channels).

“Keyword spotting via Infinity has a huge amount of benefit, not only to identify when sales have been made, but also to highlight the key themes and topics of conversation, which can lead to improvements being made to our digital marketing messages.” Cai Mullins, Vodafone

How to incorporate call tracking into your tech stack

Every moment matters. If you want to supercharge your call centre performance, boost your revenues, and improve your campaigns and strategy, call tracking software is an essential tool for your tech stack. It can capture the data needed to build smoother customer journeys and reduce the manual work involved in handling multiple calls.

With Infinity’s Speech analytics suite, Conversation Analytics, you can evolve your tactics based on real data from your customers. Being able to identify the finer points of conversation quickly and easily using call categorisation gives you the context and nuance that can be difficult to track when you’re handling high volumes of calls.

Even better, Infinity’s call tracking and analysis software integrates seamlessly with many CRM systems, allowing you to automatically draw links between marketing data and customer data. With this knowledge at your fingertips, you’re better able to map the journey your customers take and track ROI more accurately than ever before.