Call Tracking 101: What Is It and How It Helps Sales & Marketing ROI

We hear a lot about how companies need to use call tracking to see the true value of their marketing campaigns. But what is call tracking, really?

Call tracking measures the impact of marketing efforts on lead generation and sales. It was born from evidence-based marketers’ desire for increased visibility into lead sources. If all leads and sales came from simple online form conversions, it would be easy to know which ads provide the best ROI without any call tracking whatsoever. But for most industries outside of basic ecommerce – including travel, healthcare, automotive, financial services, and B2B technology – the vast majority of leads and sales are generated via the telephone. The reality is that without call tracking, as soon as a lead sees a telephone number in an ad and decides to dial, the insight into the performance of that ad disappears.

Why Companies Undervalue Call Metrics, and What They’re Missing

With the age of guesswork coming an end, every company needs a 360 degree view of their marketing ROI. Unfortunately, in many organizations, Sales and Marketing exist in such rigid silos that closing the loop between marketing effort and inbound calls seems virtually impossible. Some companies wrongly assume that it would be too difficult, or too costly. Others are simply naive about how many calls their marketing efforts actually drive.

Consider what Nutrisystem discovered when it began comparing sales conversion rates between its web and phone channels. Over the web, Nutrisystem’s close rate was between 2-3% of leads from web ads. When prospects called to talk to a Nutrisystem representative, the conversion rate jumped to 20%.

Marketing Results

At evidence-based marketing agency DemandResults, Director of Marketing Jennifer Stretch reported that clients using call tracking software for the first time often discover that 50% or more of their leads actually come via telephone. “When that much ad ROI is suddenly visible, we can make much smarter decisions about where to help clients invest their marketing. And there I’m really just referring to basic channel tracking. When clients begin tracking at the keyword level, then we can get even smarter about actual messaging and inbound marketing tactics.”

In general, increased smartphone usage and adoption, and its effects on consumer behavior, accelerates the need for insight into the connection between marketing efforts and phone calls.

Mobile devices are now used more than desktops to find find information, consume media, and then to call to place orders or discover details. In addition, mobile sales often prove to be more lucrative than in other channels — Starwood reported a 20x increase in advertising ROI through mobile click-to-call methods.

How Does Call Tracking Software Work?

Call tracking systems allow companies to instantly create local or toll-free phone numbers with the click of a button at a low cost. To companies accustomed to purchasing numbers from traditional phone carriers, the process is nothing short of a revolution. Numbers can be assigned nicknames, labels and tags so that they can easily be searched and tracked.

Next, marketers associate unique numbers with particular marketing engagements such as TV or radio ads, conference print collateral, social media ads, or even search keywords.

When a customer calls, the unique number instantly reports the ad source based on the associated phone number. Other common standard metrics include call time and geolocation reports.

Call Tracking Maturity Stages

Basic Call Tracking

In its most basic form, call tracking software can associate a campaign with a specific business telephone number. This can allow a business to automatically monitor phone metrics like number of calls, location of calls and duration of calls. Basic phone call tracking can also provide a small number of call metrics. For example, the number of sales calls that are shorter than 40 seconds (the voice equivalent of a bounce rate). However, more advanced insight requires more sophisticated software.

Campaign-Based Tracking

It’s not uncommon for even small-to-medium sized business to operate several advertising campaigns simultaneously. A brand might have six separate groups of ads based on different products. Campaign-based call tracking solutions offer a variety of numbers. Each number can focus on a different product, paid search ad group, individual ad, or even specific keyword. Each number is assigned to a specific entity. Marketing and Sales can therefore easily separate calls that originate from specific ads.

Dynamic-Number Generation for SEO & SEM

Say you are operating a large enterprise travel business. You offer flights and accommodations to literally thousands of locations across the world. Imagine how many keyword combinations could lead potential customers to your site. In order to gain any true insight into which keywords are driving phone sales, you’ll need access to a large pool of unique telephone numbers. Therefore, enterprise-level businesses usually reserve thousands of unique telephone numbers for call tracking.

With Dynamic-Number Generation, when a lead reaches your site by searching for a particular keyphrase, your business’ phone number is automatically replaced by a specific number pulled from a pool of unique phone numbers. This number will let your business know which phrase the lead used to find you. After you capture that information, the number will return to your pool of phone numbers so it can be reused.

Call Tracking CRM Integration

More sophisticated call tracking – and that which potentially brings the most return – involves tracking call metrics through a CRM, such as Salesforce.com. Tracking campaign source metrics in a CRM enables metrics that go far beyond lead generation. Companies can make decisions based on the actual revenue that is generated through specific marketing efforts rather than just looking at the number of leads.

On the grand continuum, it really has to do with marketing maturity levels. Companies running ads without any associated conversion-based metrics are at the early end of the spectrum. Those engaging in basic channel and keyword-based call tracking would be somewhere in the middle. At the same time, those making revenue-based decisions are the most mature.

When properly tracked, this practice has the potential to help align marketing and sales efforts through a standardized set of metrics. Since customer data already lives in your CRM, sales teams can gain instant access to a customer record the moment that a lead phones in. Your sales representatives will instantly know a customer’s geolocation, ad source and purchase history. CRM integration can therefore enable sales to pitch the right product at the right time.

Tracking Offline Engagements

Call tracking empowers companies to determine which offline engagements add the most value. There is no longer a need to ask a lead, “How did you find us?”

Direct response marketers have often struggled to gain visibility into which television and radio ads offer the best returns. For example, imagine you run a startup company that sells exercise equipment. You want to run radio ads, but you’re unsure of which demographics will offer the best ROI. You might find yourself running ads on a talk radio station, a Top 40 station and a station that plays R&B. In order to know which ads are driving the most sales, you will need to give three separate phone numbers. Call tracking systems can then let you know which radio stations drive the most sales.

In certain industries like software technology and healthcare, it’s very common for businesses to have a presence at trade shows. Marketers have long-struggled to quantify the ROI of their in-person marketing investments. If your business advertises in a trade-show magazine, passes one-page fliers out at a booth and gives a Powerpoint presentation, you can use assign a unique number to each of those engagements. Your business will then be able to associate their efforts with ROI, so that your in-person engagements be incrementally successful.

Tracking Online Engagements

Tracking Calls from Websites

There are many ways for web publishers to use call tracking. This section focuses on at least three use cases.

Tracking calls from a Business Directory Page

Sites that contain business listings are consistently surprised when they decide to start tracking calls from phone numbers listed on a page. It’s often useful as a test to see how effective page advertising is, and how much to charge for it. At a recent conference, a speaker cited a local auto repair service listing site that displayed the phone number of each repair shop. As a test, he decided to assign unique phone numbers to each listing, and forward those test numbers to the real business numbers. An amazing one out of every six page visitors actually called a number on the page. This type of evidence can give site operators both the confidence and the metrics with which to justify a substantial advertising fee increase.

Tracking Calls from Multiple Sites

As part of a network approach to inbound marketing, many companies operate several sites, each dedicated to serving a specific customer segment. The simplest and most common way to track lead generation from individual sites is to provision a unique local or toll-free number for each site, thereby having at least basic insight into which sites are driving leads and sales.

Tracking Any Inbound Source with Marketing Automation

Dynamic session tracking is a type of marketing automation that allows marketers to track calls from virtually any source. It’s especially useful when tracking large numbers of unique search keywords. In this scenario, brands provision a pool of phone numbers that is large enough to withstand at least a day or two of incoming phone calls from campaign sources.

For example, a company receiving roughly 1,000 calls per day might provision at least that many phone numbers. In this scenario, when a site visitor arrives after performing a Google search with the term “Hollywood Mercedes repair,” a number is automatically selected from the pool and served dynamically onto the web site.

This number is associated with that particular search term only long enough to store call metrics in analytics or in the company CRM. When the user’s session is over, the number is disassociated with the search term and repurposed for a new caller. The dynamic properties of this type of tracking are typically executed by inserting tracking code on each page of a web site, typically as a global element.

The corresponding call tracking software then automates serving dynamic numbers based on campaign source.

Revenue.io Salesforce Native Call Tracking Solution

Before building Revenue.io, we spent years on the marketing agency side, and were bewildered by the absence of call tracking systems that used best practices when passing call metrics to Salesforce.com. As anyone who has done any custom CRM workflow knows, deviating from best practices can quickly get very expensive and very messy. Of particular concern was the lack of a call tracking solution that properly used Salesforce Campaigns, which are the cornerstone of marketing metrics in Salesforce.com

Since we couldn’t find a phone call tracking tool that worked the way we thought it should, we decided to go ahead and build one ourselves. We quickly came to the conclusion that in an ideal world, marketers should be able to track virtually anything through unique phone numbers – a phone number in a PDF, in a radio ad, on a website, or in an AdWords ad. The AdWords component took the most planning since we knew that many AdWords users would be content simply to track all calls coming from their AdWords spend, while others would want to track at the campaign or ad groups level, and still others would want to get even more granular and track at the keyword level. The trick was creating a product that seamlessly passes data to Salesforce.com, without the headaches of custom CRM configuration.

Call Tracking Metrics that Matter

For most B2B companies and some B2Cs, the complex lead nurturing campaigns and remarketing ad technology at our fingertips are all part of a marathon designed to eventually enable a conversation between our sales reps and the right decision maker.

Given this, shouldn’t call tracking metrics be as essential, if not even more essential, than all the complex web analytics we now take for granted?

What happens when a prospect or existing customer picks up the phone to talk to a sales rep is still a mystery to 99% of marketers.  If some substantial percentage of B2B online searches result in a phone call, then can we really say we are measuring marketing ROI without call metrics?

Basic Call Tracking Metrics

As someone who was on the agency side for several years, I’ve had the pleasure of introducing several customers to call tracking. These programs were often ratcheted up in increasing stages of complexity, giving each client only the data that was truly actionable. It should be noted that the following basic metrics are usually only enough for startups or small businesses that don’t already have a strong ROI culture.

#1 – Numbers of Sales Calls from a Website or Websites Within a Network: 

This metric is useful when a company is operating a network of sites, and needs to see which sites are driving the most sales calls. Even such a basic KPI as this can prompt the retention or complete overhaul of a website. I’ve seen call metrics discover sites that were originally thought of as cost centers because of a low number of online leads be proven to be spectacular at driving calls.

#2 – Number of Calls By Channel

If a company is just getting their feet wet in organic search, paid search, event marketing or other channels, it can be useful to start by merely tracking how often those channels are making the phone ring. At the very least, it’s an indicator as to whether investments in those channels and the messaging associated with each are working or not.

#3 – Call Duration

This is a low-budget method of determining the number of spam calls. Ideally, a rep should be giving marketing real-time feedback by labeling call quality within a CRM or smart application. If you don’t have this luxury, then call duration is a crude method for measuring lead quality. For example, some small businesses will arbitrarily determine that any call that lasts less than one minute is not a marketing qualified lead.

Advanced Call Tracking Metrics

Advanced metrics are all about determining which marketing efforts really drive sales. After all, you could be driving a million leads every month and your reps could still not be hitting their sales quotas. To really do a great job driving these metrics, you’re going to need a powerful call tracking tool that integrates seamlessly with your CRM.

#4 – Leads, Opportunities and Revenue per Channel

These are broad KPIs, but when you can actually gain visibility into both online and offline sales through advanced call tracking, the results are incredibly powerful.  To really do this right, you need to quickly provision unique phone numbers for all your marketing channels. This means that each website, business card, eBook and social campaign needs to have a unique phone number. This is a lot easier than it sounds. With services like Revenue.io, you can provision phone numbers instantly and inexpensively and quickly associate them with channel tracking.

#5 – Revenue per Local/Regional/National Campaign

The campaign level is where marketers have the opportunity to get more granular about which regions respond to their message. Imagine that you produce one radio ad, and run it in 50 American cities. The only difference in the ad’s audio message is the phone number at the end of each one, since you have assigned a unique phone number to each market.  When the phones start ringing, you’ll get real-time data with each call, showing you exactly which markets respond to your messaging, and which you need to turn down.

#6 – Keywords Driving Leads, Opportunities and Revenue

This is a powerful metric for enterprise companies with strong inbound and demand gen marketing programs. If your AdWords manager has been getting by just seeing the number of calls from Google, providing insight into specific keywords that drive leads, opportunities and revenue will be life-changing. Don’t be surprised if it takes time for patterns to emerge. Like any testing data, the more resources you expend, the faster you’ll see results.

#7 – Calls and Revenue from A/B Landing Page Tests

If you have a reasonably mature SEM campaign and a little development bandwith to spare, you should be A/B testing different landing pages. For any business where calls are even a small component of the sales strategy, unique tracking numbers should be utilized as a part of your conversion data, right alongside other metrics such as form submissions or sales.  In many industries, calls can drive many times more revenue than online conversions. Given this fact, you’d be wise to track both the number of inbound calls and the subsequent revenue from each as separate KPIs.

#8 – Abandoned Call Rate

Are your reps losing out on valuable phone leads? The best way to find out is by tracking reps’ rate of abandoned calls. A call abandonment rate refers to the percentage of inbound callers that hang up before a rep can answer a call. This is crucial to track because inbound phone leads are often the most valuable leads of all. They’re highly engaged, they’ve usually researched your solution and are ready to have a serious sales conversation. After all, think of the last time you called a business. You probably had a good reason.

Don’t leave these high value leads hanging. If a call abandonment rate is high, it can indicate that you need to hire more reps to cover the phones. It can also indicate that calls are being routed to the wrong place, or that reps are simply failing to answer the phone. Try to make your abandonment rate as close to 0% as possible.

#9 – Number of Conversations (e.g. Average Outbound Call Duration)

What is the average length of time that reps are spending on connected calls? This metric is important because too many short calls can be an early warning sign that a rep needs guidance. If a rep consistently fails to keep prospects on the phone for longer than two minutes (the point at which many sales teams deem “a conversation”), then you may need to listen to that rep’s messaging. By drilling into call recordings you can try to gauge why prospects aren’t staying on calls. Are the leads unqualified, or is that rep failing to engage effectively?

#10 – Average Call Disposition

Revenue.io helps reps log call dispositions automatically

“Call disposition” is a term that stems from call centers referring to the outcome of a call. Some common call dispositions might include busy, no answer, hang-up or appointment set. By tracking these call outcomes in your CRM, you can view a report that gives a bird’s-eye-view of a rep’s call outcomes. This can be valuable because if there is a disproportionate amount of certain call outcomes, it can signal a red flag. As an example, if Marketing is providing Sales with a high number of disconnected numbers, then it could mean that there’s a problem with the lead source.

One way that Revenue.io helps sales teams is by enabling reps to log call dispositions in Salesforce with one click. Our tool even gives reps a gentle reminder when they forget to log dispositions. This not only saves reps time, but ensures that reps log every call outcome.

#11 – Dials to Connection Percentage

The percentage of dials that result in a prospect picking up the phone.

You may have reps on your team that are dialing leads like crazy but not actually connecting with prospects. There may be reps that are dialing less but are simply more efficient at connecting with customers.

Time of day, voicemail skills and a rep’s dialing technology can all play a role in how many dials actually result in prospects picking up the phone.

#12 – Dials to Appointments Ratio

How many conversations result in actual appointments (demos, meetings, etc.)?

Sales organizations that put a lot of emphasis on calls need to know which reps are best at booking meetings and which need work. If you have reps that are connecting with a lot of leads but not booking enough meetings, it’s important to drill down and listen to call recordings in order to identify ways that those reps can improve their pitch.

#13- Dial-to-Opportunity Percentage

How many dials should your team make per day to achieve your opportunity creation goals?

This metric is both predictive and analytical, revealing not only how much effort is needed to create an opportunity, but also how efficient your current team is. Knowing approximately how many dials it takes to create opportunities can help ensure that your team is properly staffed and that reps are keeping busy enough to move leads to the next stage.

#14- Revenue from Calls per Source

Which marketing efforts are driving the most valuable calls?

To make the best marketing investments possible, it’s vital to track revenue from leads that convert online and also revenue from leads that convert over the telephone. This is possible with a call tracking tool that integrates with your customer relationship management (CRM), where your revenue data is stored. A revenue-based call tracking tool can report which channels, campaigns, ad group and even keywords are driving calls that result in the most revenue.

#15 – Voicemail Return Rate

How successful are reps at getting leads to return voicemails?

Getting prospects to return voicemails can be one of the most difficult tasks in outbound sales. Looking at a voicemail return rate can help you identify which reps are leaving the most successful voicemails and which reps need additional coaching. You can also check to see whether coaching initiatives improve reps’ voicemail return rates.

Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Call Tracking Solution

Even the most experienced marketers aren’t always clear on which phone call tracking features will add the most value to their particular business model. For example, some businesses might only want campaign-level tracking data, while others might need the granularity of keyword-level insight. Before investing, know which questions to ask.

What are you trying to accomplish with call tracking?

When comparing solutions, it helps to identify your short and long-term goals. For example, a short-term goal might be attributing the referral source of every phone lead from social media, while a long-term goal might be boosting marketing ROI by 20%. Try to find a solution that will give you the data to meet not only short term, but also long-term goals.

Are you looking for a call tracking solution to align sales and marketing?

Most solutions are intended to be pure-play Marketing IT tools. However, CRM-based solutions can actually help build bridges between Sales and Marketing teams. A great CRM-based tool can instantly enable sales reps to see a caller’s marketing referral source, as well as give sales reps the ability to provide marketers real-time feedback about lead quality. The can help sales reps and marketers work together to drive ROI.

Would you like a solution that integrates with your CRM seamlessly?

Lots of phone call tracking systems claim to integrate with CRM tools like Salesforce.com. In reality, many of these integrations are complex, requiring you to upload data into your CRM from spreadsheets or hire a CRM consultant to do pricey customization work. If you’re investigating a solution, be sure to ask what is involved with CRM integration. Is it truly plug-and-play?

How robust are your reporting requirements?

What level of insight do you need? Do you just want to know which search engine drives the most calls? Do you want to know which AdWords campaigns offer the best ROI? Or do you want to know which paid and organic keywords deliver the best calls? It’s important to identify the level of granularity you are looking for, and then find a solution that meets those needs.

Does you require on-demand, scalable features to meet your specific needs?

You might be content with basic call tracking now, but I’m going to take a wild guess that your goal is for your business to grow. While basic website call tracking might offer the insight into advertising spend that you need now or align with your current marketing budget, you might soon find that you want more insight. Take the time to investigate whether a call tracking service offers scalable features that can keep up with your business as it grows. Is it easy to add additional users? Can you instantly provision new phone numbers and track new channels at any time? Can you devise complex new call routing scenarios at the drop of a hat?

Are you looking to track ROI from online ads, offline ads or both?

Where are you investing your advertising dollars? Do you go to trade shows? Buy radio time? Run AdWords campaigns? Advertise on social media sites? Create inbound marketing content online? Before investing, make sure that the system in question will enable you to track the efforts that you invest in. Otherwise, you can’t truly get 360 degree visibility into marketing ROI.

How much training does it require to use the system?

Marketers tend to be busy folks, and we don’t have time to spend a million years provisioning call tracking numbers. It’s important to find a solution that makes it quick and easy to provision large quantities of call tracking numbers. This can especially come in handy if you’re looking to track lots of keywords at once. But even if you aren’t, provisioning numbers, and associating them with your CRM, should be a quick process.

How important is one-click integration with Google Analytics and AdWords?

If you want to track online efforts, it’s important to find a solution that can quickly and easily integrate with your Google AdWords PPC and Google Analytics accounts. For AdWords, one way to get underneath this is to ask whether the company utilizes a Google AdWords API. If so, then the process is more likely to be easy.

Are you looking for a call tracking solution with routing capabilities?

Certain call tracking solutions actually give marketers the ability to route calls to sales reps, or even entire groups of sales reps, based on a caller’s referral source. This can be a game-changer since it can cut down on a caller’s hold time and help ensure that prospects are always routed to the right rep. If intelligent call routing can add value to your business, be sure to ask if a call tracking solution offers routing capabilities.

Implementing a Call Tracking Solution

We’re quite proud of the solution. You can quickly associate any number to any marketing channel. Then, with a single click, you can associate any number with any existing Salesforce campaign. Better yet, if the campaign that you want doesn’t already exist, you can create it instantly without ever having to leave Revenue.io.

For companies looking to implement call tracking for Salesforce and align sales and marketing data, Revenue.io offers a fully integrated solution that eliminates manual data entry and ensures seamless tracking of inbound and outbound calls. By passing detailed call data—such as call duration, call outcome, and campaign attribution—into Salesforce in real-time, businesses gain unparalleled visibility into which campaigns and channels drive the best results. Whether you’re tracking calls at the keyword level for paid search or connecting inbound call leads to specific Salesforce Campaigns, our call tracking tool simplifies workflows and boosts ROI.