Whether you’re a marketer, a customer service or support manager, call tracking can help you understand your inbound calls. You can learn how people are finding your business, the volume of calls you are receiving and with the right platform, the reason people are calling your business in the first place. Given the power of call tracking and analytics, you may be wondering how call tracking actually works.
The answer is, by leveraging call tracking numbers or CTNs. CTNs are provisioned from call carriers and are assigned from a pool of either local or toll-free numbers, depending on which you choose.
From there, your call tracking platform can help you do several things:
- Determine the media or channels where you want to track inbound calls (or texts!)
- Provision CTNs from your call tracking provider. With Marchex Marketing Edge, this is a self-serve option you can take from right within the platform.
- Assign CTNs to the identified media and channels from which you want to receive call tracking data.
- Deploy your media that drives calls and texts and see the data displayed across dashboards in your platform. Much of your data including conversion values can be integrated into other tools you use such as Google Ads and Google Analytics. Depending on your marketing strategy, you may prefer one view over another.
- Use the information you’ve gathered to optimize your marketing strategies and optimize your budget.
So, what kind of data will you actually see in your dashboard? Here’s an example:
In this overview dashboard, you can learn the volume of calls you received over the past 30 days and which campaign source they came from. You also learn how many calls were answered, how many were missed and how many were unique. Unique calls are calculated by totaling different inbound phone numbers. Total calls include all calls – if a caller called multiple times, each call is counted.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. You can filter or drill into calls by day, time or specific campaign. You can even get down to the specific keyword if you set up your CTNs to track to level of granularity. Depending on the platform, you can get AI-based insights, such as whether the call was actually from a potential customer. And given that you need these insights across our marketing stack, with the right platform, call data can be integrated with the tools you use every day so you can make informed decisions in real time.
If you’d like to learn about the Marchex call tracking and analytics solution, visit the Marketing Edge product page.
