What is call tracking?

Call tracking is the tracking of inbound calls from potential leads who have found your phone number after being influenced by marketing. In other words, you track that someone took the number from, for example, your website.

Indhold

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As a company, you have most likely run several different marketing activities. If you do not have a webshop or an online booking system, but instead calls are your most important conversion action, then call tracking should be a central part of your lead tracking setup.

Track the impact of your marketing with call tracking

If a potential customer has found you through a Google Ads search ad or a Facebook ad, you can track the call back to that marketing channel—indeed, all the way back to which campaign, ad, and keyword led to the enquiry.

When the user has clicked through to your website via, for example, an ad, your main number will be replaced with a call-tracking number which, when forwarding to your main number, also records which marketing activity led to the call.

There are many good use cases for call tracking. Online, you typically use dynamic call tracking, which works by dynamically replacing your number with a random forwarding number from the pool for each session. That way, the call can be traced back to the source that generated it.

If, on the other hand, you want to track the impact of offline marketing from, for example, print media, this can also be done with a static call-tracking number. When someone calls the number, they are automatically forwarded to your specified phone number, and it is recorded at the same time that the printed ad generated a lead via a phone enquiry.

Why is it important to track a call?

It is important if your new customers primarily come through calls as the first point of contact. If you use several different sales and marketing activities, it is essential to have an idea of which of these activities are worth spending money and time on.

And that is exactly the kind of insight call tracking will give you.

As a company, you may even have tried to hire an external party to handle lead generation via paid advertising. If so, you may have experienced a consultant reporting that you have achieved a certain number of conversions and asking whether you should increase the budget to get more conversions. Perhaps you have been able to sense progress, but lack proof of how many new customers your external consultant has brought you.

You can get answers to all of that with call tracking. At Morningtrain, we use the Danish tool Trailhub to track leads via calls. With our own internal system, we also ensure these leads are followed through to completion to track the number of customers and revenue that the marketing has generated. A call—in other words, a lead—is not worth much if it does not become a customer.

In other words, we say no thanks to guesswork and gut feelings, and provide you with accurate data so you can make the right decisions at the right times.

Call tracking is essential when calculating ROI

When you need to calculate the return on your marketing initiatives for lead generation, call tracking is essential. By using a tool like Trailhub to track calls, and then following up on which calls have turned into a sale, you can calculate your ROI for each of your marketing channels relatively accurately. You know who called, and how much that new contact is worth if an order is closed.

Operationally, you can use this knowledge to make decisions about where budgets should be allocated and which activities should be scaled back. Without call tracking and subsequent follow-up from lead to customer, you are operating blind and will most likely not get the most out of your sales and marketing activities.

Which companies can use call tracking?

Some companies are more obvious than others, but any company where calls are the primary conversion action from new customers will benefit from call tracking.

Unless you have a webshop or a booking system, new customers will mainly contact you by phone with the intention of becoming a customer. If that is the case, we strongly encourage you to use call tracking alongside your marketing to ensure you can allocate money and resources as effectively as possible.

In some cases, you may also receive enquiries from new potential customers via email or a contact form

Call tracking in Google Ads

We use Trailhub for call tracking. You get fixed forwarding numbers, and data can be sent directly to Google Analytics, Google Sheets, CRM systems, and a wide range of other platforms using Zapier.

In Google Ads, however, you can find a free alternative if you want to get started cheaply, can live with a lack of control over the numbers, and simply want to track calls as leads. Here you can set up Google Ads call tracking, which is Google’s own call-tracking tool. Unfortunately, it only works in Google Ads and not with other platforms. Therefore, we recommend Trailhub as a better alternative.

Below you can see the advantages and disadvantages of Google Ads call tracking.

Advantages of Google Ads call tracking

It is 100% free to use advertising via Google Ads.
You can quickly and easily set up call tracking to see which campaigns and keywords generate calls.

Disadvantages of Google Ads call tracking

It only works with Google Ads advertising and therefore cannot be used with other marketing platforms.
You can track callers and measure cost per enquiry, but you cannot follow the call further and track cost per new customer.
The forwarding numbers are randomly selected from Google’s huge pool of numbers. This means you never know which phone number will appear on your website, and it is also constantly changing.

The disadvantages of using Google’s own call tracking are so significant that we only see Trailhub as a viable option. With prices this low, it does not make sense to choose Google Ads call tracking over Trailhub.

Analysis, follow-up on results, and optimisation

We recommend that you do as we do ourselves. At Morningtrain, we go one step further and verify that the numbers we see online have actually turned into sales in our customers’ (and our own) business.

We use Trailhub for call tracking and record the calls in a spreadsheet, where you can subsequently register which calls have turned into customers and how much the customer was worth. That way, we can follow up on the real value of each call, which is worth its weight in gold when calculating true ROI and in the optimisation work on your marketing.

Concluding points

If you have a business that is not a webshop, or where new customers come via a self-service booking system, there is a high likelihood that your marketing leads will contact you via calls, email, or a contact form. Therefore, we will summarise one last time why you should use call tracking:

In many cases, calls account for the vast majority of customer enquiries.
Call tracking is an almost indispensable tool if you want to know the value of your marketing activities and have the ability to optimise activities and allocate budgets based on what creates the most value for you and your business.
You can easily get started tracking calls with Trailhub, and if you would like help registering which calls generate sales and which do not, you are welcome to contact us.

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