Calls & Marketing — Your Campaigns Could Perform Better Than You Think

Call tracking can be the hidden champion in your marketing effort

Calls are boring and terribly clunky. They don’t really show up in your analytics tool. You can kind of track them through google’s call extension, but is it even necessary?

First of all, how does your business look like? I suppose it’s some form of e-commerce. You’re selling some products online, most likely.

The first step to evaluate if your marketing results might be misleading you is to determine how important calls are for you. Here is a simple checklist:

• Does your product require long-term interactions with your clients?
• Is your product expensive?
• Does your product need an explanation?

Let us look at amazon. The whole customer journey is designed to be as easy as possible. You trust in it. The lead is guided through a meticulously crafted process that does not require human interaction.

But you might be selling an online course. Maybe some form of coaching or consulting. Depending on the factors stated above, your lead might need some clarification to convert.

“Sales is not about selling anymore, but about building trust and educating.” Siva Devaki

“Trust” might be what your lead needs. Chatbots don't raise your lead's trust level and contact forms are not sexy at all. To sum it up — calls might be very important for you.

Where The Problem Is

You won’t find it, and that is the point.

Let us stay with the example above. You’re selling online courses, teaching about how to be a better writer on medium and you compare your keywords in google analytics.

So you’re spending money. Knowing your ROI and ROAS is a key factor for your performance marketing to be successful.

The worst-case scenario would involve you misjudging the performance of a beneficial keyword.

• “Medium Course” might bring 200 leads with a conversion rate of 4%
• “Medium Trainer” could seem inferior with just 20 leads and no conversions at all

Here Comes the Absolutely Simple Switcheroo

“Medium Trainer” could have brought you 30 calls with a conversion rate of 35%. Without knowing what is happening on the telephone, you might have neglected the better performing keyword.

You would optimize your campaigns and shift your marketing spending towards inferior efforts, without being aware of it.

What would you say if I told you, that a call can be displayed in your google analytics just like every other interaction on your homepage?

And I don’t mean the “click here to show number” — workaround that marketplaces often use to get a feeling for calls.

How Call Tracking Works, Very Briefly!

The easy version is just to track your different channels. You would use different numbers for every channel.

You‘d know how many calls originated on LinkedIn/Facebook/Google Ads/Print(?!). It’s a start, I guess. For a digital business like yours, that is not enough, there is something even better.

By displaying a different number for every visitor and linking it to his/her cookie ID you’ll have the whole customer journey linked to a call.

This means that you can even re-report successful calls to your analytics tool.

If you add up all of this, you’ll exactly know how much which call was actually worth!

Some Call Tracking providers offer this as a basic product in their portfolio.

Final Thoughts

Calls might be the hidden champion in your business. By measuring which marketing effort brings you those leads, you could finally have that edge you need to spiral your business to the next level.

My personal experience is that calls actually convert better if your business model relies on personal contact.

B2C can be complicated, I think. If the “net” you’re using to catch those leads is big enough you don’t really need to display a number.

B2B can absolutely rely on calls. A call might result in a 5k thick contract. Knowing what brings in those leads is what you should take away from this article.

I want to assure you, implementing a basic form of Call Tracking is easy.

And just to clarify — I’m talking about the European market. I don’t know how the legislature treats Call Tracking in the states.