Implementation of Call Tracking Spikes an Increase in Sales

Client and Industry

Our client is a US company that provides health and beauty services, including cryotherapy, vitamin injections, rejuvenation and detoxification therapies. Clever Solution began working with the client two years ago, providing SEO and social media promotion.

Call tracking implemented as a tool for tracking successful traffic

In the process of promoting our client’s brand, we encountered the problem of not being able to identify the source of customer calls and further purchases. In 2018, we decided to implement call tracking, to better understand which traffic sources were the most effective.

Call tracking technology tracks phone calls and associates them with a specific marketing source. Its code is installed on the site to collect call statistics. Call tracking serves to correctly distribute the marketing budget and increase sales.

Google Analytics provides detailed statistics on visits to your website, including the advertising sources that generate each customer’s visit. However, GA data only applies to online activity. It does not provide data on customer calls made directly to your business. Call tracking resolves this problem, giving website owners more information about the success of marketing campaigns.

Client concerns and solutions

When implementing call tracking, our client had a number of concerns:

• The client was sure that once a phone number became part of a brand, it could never be changed

In the past, people memorized phone numbers, and businesses tried to get easy-to-remember numbers to guarantee customer returns. Today, smartphones have revolutionized phone usage, and few people try to memorize phone numbers. It is easier to simply add a number to Contacts, or quickly locate a company’s number on the Internet.

• The client feared they would be assigned a phone number that had been used by someone else, and that they would receive spam phone calls.

The phone numbers of former telephone customers fall into a repository. From there, they are returned to a general database of clean free numbers, but only if they have not received any calls for a month. At this point, the number has already been removed from the dialer bases of various call centers, and the contact has been dropped. Customers receive new numbers only after they have been cleared.

• The client was worried that old customers would not be able to reach the business using its old phone number.

When connecting call tracking, an old company phone number will still work. Calls from a phone book or business card will still go through. You will be able to estimate how many people actually remember the old number, and how many look up the number on the site.

Call tracking helps determine the channels calls come from, whether these are websites or offline advertising.

You can track calls with 3 types of call tracking

• Static – a separate number is assigned to each advertising source. Static call tracking is used for offline advertising.
• Dynamic – different numbers are shown to different visitors. After calling by phone, the service receives information about the source, customer behavior, the page from which the call was made, and other relevant data. Dynamic tracking is used for online advertising.
• Combined – both types of tracking can be combined to track calls from ads placed both online and offline. It is also used when detailed call information is only required for a limited number of traffic sources.

The main goal of call tracking is to save the marketing budget, improve the performance of call center and sales managers, reduce the cost of attracting customers and increase profits as an end result.

The most effective and widely used approach is dynamic tracking per session. This method shows each online user a unique number, allowing you to compare the call with a specific visit, and to gather valuable data on each caller:

• source, channel, campaign, keyword;
• user behavior: pages viewed, associated conversions;
• device, browser, region, IP address, operating system.

The metrics of call uniqueness must be considered.

1. Target – an incoming call that lasts longer than expected and has no doubles within the sales cycle.
2. Repeated – a contact lasting longer than expected and having doubles within the sales cycle.
3. Unique – the initial reach from a particular user, that has low importance.
4. The first target reach from a specific user that lasts longer than expected.
5. A unique target reach occurs when the initial call from a specific user becomes a target, with a longer duration than expected.

Optimizing call analytics campaigns

Once we determined which marketing strategies brought the most calls from customers, we were able to:

• Identify and disable campaigns that did not result in calls or sales.
• Separate the regions from which most calls came into individual campaigns.
• Listen to recorded call conversations to determine if the campaign was aimed at the right audience, and to more accurately identify the needs of users and gather new ideas for expanding semantics.
• Estimate the resources necessary to attract a client, disable expensive and ineffective keywords, and raise bids on keys that lead to targeted calls.
• Report on the distribution of calls by day of the week and time of day. This allowed us to optimize advertising bids at peak hours, based on the service data.

By optimizing traffic sources and tracking calls from them, we were able to achieve excellent results. The number of calls has increased by more than two times compared to last year. The client received a total of 857 calls in November, 2019, 475 of which were unique, compared to November 2018, when our client received 417 total calls, 215 of which were unique.

Conclusion

Companies who invest in marketing should track their calls. This investment pays off by optimizing costs based on call data.

The business phone number, which is considered part of the brand, does not go away once call tracking is connected. Calls will still come in from customers who recorded or memorized the old phone number.

If tracking is disconnected, the number is deemed “defended.” They are not transferred to new customers until a month has passed since the last incoming call. Spam calls directed to the previous owner will not interfere with new users. In addition, the number can be redeemed.

Ongoing analytics is a must, since the advertising market directly depends on the actions of competitors and the emergence of new products. If the call tracking tool is useful, it should be used on an ongoing basis.