It’s a fact that most of your potential customers will use the internet at some point before they buy from you.
Whether it’s to help them understand exactly what they need in the first place, read reviews, ask for advice, research the options or to actually buy the product/service.
However, many businesses, particularly those that deal with more expensive products or have complicated service offerings are likely to find that customers come to them through the more traditional channel of the dog and bone (otherwise known as telephone).
You can get a lot of information about what people are looking at on your website, how long they’re spending looking and what actions they’re completing.
What if their only action is to get your number and call you?
How can you measure this and attribute it to the money you’ve spent on promoting your business online, in this article we aim to give you a few options on how to bridge the gap between the online and offline world when it comes to telephone calls.
It’s worth me calling out that we don’t get paid to promote the services below, nor are we customers of all of them, we’ve just pulled together a few of the “hot” options in the call tracking market place.
How does this affect my organisation?
If you pick up the phone to customers on a regular basis, you can be quite sure it will affect you in some way.
Let us consider the example of someone who owns and runs a bookkeeping business, they’ve called in Bean Counters 4U, they’ve also created a website as part of their efforts to attract new clients.
Bean Counters 4U decide to spend some money promoting their business, they decide to invest $500 in Google AdWords, boost some of their posts to a highly targeted audience on Facebook and take out an ad in the local paper (do people still do that!?). They receive 10 phone calls, 3 of which become clients. 2 of the clients say they found the business online, but how!?
By using call tracking technology we can join the dots and find out exactly which marketing activity drove the inquiries that lead to sales.
What to look for…
When it comes to choosing an effective tool for telephone call tracking there’s a lot out there and it can all get a little over-bearing, here are our tips on what you need to think about when selecting your call tracking tool:
- Cost – I’m reluctant to put this one first, but it’s sensible to think about it. If you’re a small business recruiting one or two new clients a month then you won’t want to shell out a lot of cash on your call tracking tool. Whereas if you’re a large corporate, receiving thousands of telephone inquiries each month then you’ll be able to spend a bit more and get the enterprise level features. Fear-not there are plenty of tools out there that offer options that grow with your business.
- Ease of use – will the system work the way your business works? For example if the system is designed to announce the callers origin as you answer are your team in a position to log these details as the call comes through? Or do you need something that integrates with your existing sales platform (Salesforce, Pipeline Deals or whatever else you might be using).
- Integrations – following on from the above, if you’re already using CRM or analytics systems will the phone tracking system integrate with your existing systems out of the box? If you’re using Google Analytics (you definitely should be) consider how the system integrates with that – Universal Analytics gives you a whole world of power when it comes to tying in data from phone systems for you to chew through.
- Type of numbers available – if the software provider is going to provide you with a dedicated phone number for tracking purposes, do they offer a number that matches the region(s) in which you do business? Do they offer any kind of number port service so that you retain ownership of the phone number even if you move provider? How many different numbers are they able to offer you and are they across a similar range or ENTIRELY different numbers?
- Call recording – do you want the tool to record the entire conversation for later review? If your operators are processing credit card payments as part of the call does the provider offer a facility to ensure that this part of the call is PCI compliant (some will stop recording whilst card details are announced)?
Overview of Web Call Tracking Tools
Fone Dynamics
Fone Dynamics comes with a comprehensive web call tracking system to provide more than 100 million minutes of tracked calls.
They also make calls related data analysis easily available for use by your company’s marketing teams.
The Fone Dynamics tool enables you to integrate call tracking with Google Analytics. Here at Digital Ninjas we love anything that integrates with Google Analytics.
This integration enables you to leverage the advanced features of the Google Analytics platform and provides deep insights into the call conversion patterns.
Fone Dynamics also has a range of CRM connectors available. Allowing you to report call-related information in your own CRM environment which helps you learn which type of traffic and calls are generating more revenue.
Infinity Call Tracking
This cloud-based call tracking service is among the top rated applications in the Google Apps Gallery.
The Infinity phone call tracking system is available in about 50 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the U.S.
It comes complete with some truly whizz-bang Google Analytics integrations. That result in integrated visitor tracking capabilities, as it uses a concept called “visitor level call tracking”.
By using this method, the system tracks every site visitor by recording the networks, keywords, channels, visitor locations, times and dates, page views, and the length of time a visitor was on your website.
It sends several custom dimensions, along with the phone call data into Google Analytics.
Some additional key features offered by the Infinity system include:
- A PPC analysis report,
- An attribution modelling system,
- CRM integration,
- “Advanced” virtual receptionists, and
- The Caller Insight App for Salesforce (for a real-time view of the previous caller interactions).
Jet Interactive
An Australia based call tracking solution.
It was also one of the first companies to partner with Google to present a call tracking case study – Google wouldn’t be working with them on case studies if the product was lame.
Jet Interactive helps to track calls from both online sources (search engines, social media, affiliate websites and so on) and offline sources (traditional advertising methods).
And, like most of the other popular call tracking tools, this tool also allows you to feed your call data to web based tools and analytics accounts, such as Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
This solution offers an interactive reporting facility which enables you to view graphical reports whenever you need.
Delacon
The advanced call tracking system offered by Delacon allows you to track the calls from online sources and offers additional features, such as:
- Recording the calls,
- Sending automatic alerts whenever a call is received, and
- Routing calls to be able to optimise call conversions.
This solution thus basically assists you in identifying what happens before, during and after a call. It also allows you to add all the data you have obtained to your specific Delacon software platform or Google Analytics.
You can even add the data to any other platform that you may already be using.
As this system allows you to get comprehensive information and analysis related to all your phone calls, your business is able to optimise its marketing strategies accordingly.
Another big benefit of using Delacon’s services is that their services are available in several countries across the globe. They also have the capability to help you track calls which originate from countries in which they do not operate.
Summary
We’ve name checked a few of the available call tracking solutions above, there are many more out there.
A major advantage of all the tools we’ve covered is that they are extremely easy to use and even the smallest businesses can start using them with no prior knowledge or experience.
Make sure you consider your businesses opening hours when implementing the tracking code. Many tools will allow you to specific this in the control panel and display a different number, remove the number and/or provide an alternative method of contact.
Remember, the Advantages of Web Call Tracking
- It makes it easy to understand the reason and source of every phone call received from your website (and often other marketing channels).
- This will make it easier for you to make business decisions based on data showing what is and isn’t working.
Are you considering a specific call tracking solution, get in touch with a Ninja today for some impartial advice on which solution will work best for your business.
