Call Tracking in Digital Advertising

When it comes to conversion tracking, the majority of phone call types are considered offline conversions (conversion actions that don’t happen online and don’t require an internet connection to be completed). Hence, capturing call data often requires a more creative and integrated approach than other online lead types, such as Live Chat or Lead Form submission.

The key aspects of phone call tracking include quantity, quality, and conversion source. These basic metrics lay the groundwork needed to analyse how effective your campaign messaging is in driving lead calls, how different channels impact the conversion journey,  and how to extract valuable audience insights from available performance metrics. 

What can be measured in call tracking?

The conversion journey can be tracked via the below simple, to more advanced call metrics:

1. Call source: Which channels are driving your call conversions, organically & through paid advertising. Geographical locations also matter if the call function of your business exceeds across country boundaries.
2. Call quantity: The number of calls you are getting and how they fluctuate over time.
3. Call length: The duration of calls is a good indicator of how intentional your prospects are when they make the call, and how well your customer team is handling the lead calls.
4. Call time: This data helps identify when your prospects are most likely to reach out, and what enquiry they would be most likely to make at specific times of the day or on specific dates. Not only can you manage your team resources better with this information, but you can also customise your ad messaging & Call-to-actions accordingly. 
5. A number of first-time callers: Just like your website’s new users, new callers generally require a different amount of interaction time and level of support to get to know your brand better. This metric helps you identify which assets are most effective at driving new callers, and how to leverage them better or lead acquisition purposes.
6. Missed calls: With business models that heavily rely on phone calls as the main source of leads, the missed calls ratio can cause a significant impact on the Cost per Acquisition. Keeping track of missed calls is the first step to resolving any capacity-related issues and defining the lead follow-up practices. 
7. Digital touch points within the conversion journey (before and after a lead call): With cross-channel tracking techniques in place, you can have visibility on how users interacted with your Brand before and after making a phone call. It is possible to see which Search queries are driving users with high call intent, which social media and display ads they have seen before making a call, and if a prospect ends up converting after calling your company. 

How calls are tracked across digital channels 

While each digital channel has its own nuances when it comes to conversion tracking, the core methodologies for call tracking stay similar across digital platforms. Depending on your business’s capacity & needs, we recommend three different levels of Phone call tracking:

1. Call clicks initiated within ads (online): This level allows you to track clicks on a Phone number or the ‘Call now’ Call-to-actions available in Google’s Search or Facebook ads using each platform’s built-in metrics. While it is not guaranteed that a call actually happened, this level of tracking requires minimal set-up efforts and gives you an idea of your audience’s initial intent when seeing the ads.
2. Call clicks initiated on the websites (online): Once you have implemented the initially required tags to track users landing on the site from different ad platforms, it requires little effort to set up additional tags to track clicks on the ‘Call’ buttons and interactive Phone numbers on your site. This level of tracking gives you better visibility over previous touch points in the consumer journey, and customisation capabilities over your tag setup. 
3. Phone calls initiated offline by users, after seeing the phone number on an ad or the website: A more creative approach is taken for digital advertisers to track calls that happened offline or on a different device, often referred to as Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI). Via a customised code placed across website pages, this technology replaces a business’s fixed phone number with a dynamically generated one. These proxy phone numbers are assigned specifically to a campaign, channel, ad or ad item (keywords), allowing advertisers to pinpoint the source of each call that comes through. This service is available for free across selective Google Search assets and is offered by various third-party call-tracking service providers.

Paint a complete picture of your customer journey

Now that you are ready to measure & utilise call conversion as one of your main conversion goals, it might be beneficial to take your call tracking to the next level and start painting a complete picture of your customer acquisition journey via integration. 

Enable in-depth analysis of holistic channel performance by ensuring your conversion data is transferable across advertising, analytics, and CRM platforms. To understand more about how you can utilise your call data to unlock more powerful & actionable insights for your business, reach out to an ADMATICian today for advice on your current conversion tracking process, and more!