I talked recently about the value of understanding your customers’ journey to help you place your advertising in areas where you’re most likely to influence their behaviour. 

When someone contacts your business via a web submission form, your analytics setup will tell you which advertisement or campaign led them to your website.  

But what if they contact you by phone? Unless you ask them, you might not know what prompted them to call.  

We’ve been using call tracking for some time to give clients the crucial data that’s missing from online data analytics. We have options to suit different needs, but the bottom line is that call tracking tells you what inspired someone to call you and what they did prior to picking up the phone. 

With this information you can identify which marketing channels are generating the most sales, and reallocate your valuable marketing dollars as appropriate, for the best return on your investment.  

It works like this: Visitors to your website are allocated a unique phone number for the duration of their session. Once a call is made, we can report their session information and attribute keyword, source, medium and more, to that call. 

Thanks to a clever piece of software, you even know when a call is an Ark Advance lead. When you pick up the phone, “call whisper” kicks in and tells you, so you know this call has come from a paid ad.  

At the end of the phone call, you can vote on whether it was a good lead or a bad lead, either by inputting a number on the phone or by going to an online portal and updating notes next to each phone call.  We can then integrate that data with your analytics and track it to the source.  

Alternatively, you can give us a data file of all your sales and we can match up the phone numbers so we know which numbers (and therefore which ads) generated sales, and which ones didn’t.  

You can use call tracking for your offline advertising as well, by using a unique phone number for each of your traditional offline advertising channels.  

As well as eliminating the guesswork so you can make data-driven marketing decisions, call tracking can also improve your business’s customer experience.  

You can not only find out which ad prompted the customer to call, but also what they want, what questions were asked, what concerns were expressed, where they are on the buyer’s journey, and ultimately if the sale was made. You can share these insights with your customer service or sales staff to ensure the customer experience is always improving. 

We may be living in a digital world, but human interaction remains vitally important and a bad customer experience will ruin a sale, no matter how good your product. 

If you want to know more about call tracking and discuss how it can help you grow your business, get in touch with us today.