What Is a Call Tracking Number, and Why Use It?

Now that everyone has smartphones, the way the average customer shops has completely altered, leading to an increase in use of mobile devices as research tools.

According to recent research, 52% of mobile advertisements and 70% of mobile searches end in a phone call. This is why it’s crucial for companies to learn about the touchpoints within a single customer shopping session that led to the inbound call.

Brands can enhance the client experience and capture crucial call data using call tracking software. Every business needs a call tracking phone number to successfully tie phone calls to the digital campaigns, understand the customer journey better, and get more actionable data.

What Is the Meaning of a Call Tracking Number?

One of the features that tracking solutions and apps offer users is a call tracking number. It lets clients keep track of a personal phone number by showing where it is located and giving carrier information.

Numbers that are used for call tracking are unique and assigned to marketing campaigns or sessions. Your company phone line receives all incoming calls via a trackable phone number, which makes it simple to access the different call-tracking data related to the specific digital campaign and strategy.

Find out how brands can measure the value of inbound calls and capture critical data by reading more in-depth details about call tracking systems here.

When businesses use call-tracking phone numbers, prospective customers engage with them through various campaigns, which include both online and offline interactions. Any local, vanity, or toll-free number may be used as a trackable one.

When a customer dials up a call, the trackable number forwards the call to the business number, enabling a brand to record information about the customer journey and activities made while on the phone. Tracking calls keeps the data trail going even when a customer hangs up.

 

The level of data granularity that call tracking systems provide is frequently contingent upon the level of service sophistication. You can capture and use different types of data with Phonexa’s Call Logic, like keywords, dates, call details, time, and call outcomes.

Analytics of Conversation	Detailed Campaign Data	Information about Real-Time Calls	Contextual Data
Conversation patterns and keywords	Source campaigns	Area code, ID, phone number, caller’s name, etc.	Emails, chats, previous customer calls, and other communication
Purchases, appointments, quotes, etc.	Channels of marketing	Duration of the call, date, time	Purchase behavior
Analysis of sentiment	Advertisement groups	Recordings of calls	Customer interaction insights
Transcription from voice to text	Partner IDs (Adobe, Google, etc.)	Keypresses	Psychographics

From this data, you can discover and assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, get detailed attribution, and identify the resources your company needs to increase conversion and retention rates.

Local Numbers

Businesses are connected to a specific region or community via local phone numbers. These numbers work very well for brands that want to reach customers who like to buy from small businesses. On top of that, marketers running local campaigns can benefit from local tracking numbers.

Toll-Free Numbers

Toll-free tracking numbers create the idea that your company is global and professional. Customers who call these numbers—even those who call from various regions—don’t incur any costs since they are toll-free.

Marketers frequently use toll-free (800) telephone numbers with landing pages and paid search campaigns on Google Ads. Companies that don’t track 800 numbers often have trouble optimising their campaigns and risk misinterpreting the results because they don’t have enough data.

Brands find it considerably more difficult to assess the effectiveness of each digital campaign, which takes much longer to identify statistically significant patterns that lead to a rise or fall in retention or conversion performance when they have just half the data. However, when 800 number tracking is in place, companies can assess the impact of their multi-location marketing on sales and use the best marketing experiments in their regular ad campaigns.

Conventional offline marketing campaigns that involve billboards, TV, or radio ads may also make use of toll-free vanity numbers. Additionally, until the trackable phone numbers are available on the website, marketers may use toll-free numbers for digital marketing.

Vanity Tracking Numbers

In order to stand out and increase brand awareness, brands use vanity numbers. Such numbers are primarily highly valued due to their memorability and the fact that they may be associated with certain marketing campaigns.

Some of the most important benefits that vanity numbers give to brands are:

• Increased call volume with memorable phrases or words are incorporated into distinctive phone numbers
• Increasing presence on a national and local scale
• Better brand awareness

Why Implement Call Tracking for Marketing Campaigns

Marketers may learn more about the influence of referral, organic, and search traffic on call conversions by tracking telephone calls. For instance, if a PPC campaign leads to calls, it’s important to know which keywords drive these results.

With the use of call tracking software, brands may learn more about the customer journey. In order to close the gap between the leads generated online and offline, businesses must comprehend the events that transpire during the call and online.

Call tracking providers assist businesses in enabling Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) on their landing ads, pages, or websites. In addition, they assign a dedicated number to each visitor based on the medium (e.g., organic, referral, paid search, email).

This way, marketers are able to get detailed information on the callers who clicked on a certain advertisement or SEO listing and examine how a particular journey led to the callers dialling your actual company number.

Dynamic vs. Static Call Tracking Numbers

There are still some brands that still use static call number tracking. It lets marketers assign specific phone numbers to both conventional and online marketing channels, such as billboards, flyers, and TV ads.

So now, let us take a closer look at how static call number tracking works.

Businesses that employ static number tracking assign specific phone numbers to each advertising source.

When a customer calls a company, the software routes calls to the business phone line. After that, the system will match the dialled number with the advertising source.

Following that, the advertising source is shown in the call log along with other caller details such as name, phone number, audio recording, call length and time, and so on. In the final step, the provider of call tracking services sends data to Google Analytics or another integrated solution.

This process becomes somewhat more intricate with the implementation of dynamic call tracing. With the help of call tracking codes, websites can utilise multiple phone numbers and swap them for each user who visits the site. It is utilised by businesses for call tracking at the session-level, channel-based, and campaign-level.

Here’s how it works:

• Visitors arrive at a landing page or the company’s website
• They observe various telephone tracking numbers
• Details about these visits are gathered by the system, which then compares them to phone numbers that can be tracked
• The call log shows keywords, campaigns, channels, ad sources, and other valuable information
• The information is transferred to another integrated system if any

The main distinction between the two methods is that, unlike the static technique, dynamic call number tracking correlates calls with users’ sessions rather than the ad source.

In the end, it helps brands obtain a comprehensive understanding of every individual customer journey by transmitting call data to the analytics system, which allows them to view the conversion history of visitors.

How a Dynamic Number Pool Is Determined

Determining the appropriate size of a pool of toll-free tracking numbers to acquire all the necessary data is a common challenge for marketers. However, because analytics accuracy is dependent on the quantity of numbers reserved for the tracking pool, paying attention to this issue is essential.

Trackable phone numbers, as you already know, forward incoming calls to whatever numbers you choose for your company. Services may vary in the quantity of numbers providers offer as part of a bundle, and the cost of additional numbers is typically an additional expense.

You might consider reserving or leasing additional phone numbers in case your website traffic unexpectedly surges. Knowing how to calculate the pool of phone numbers you need is, therefore, essential.

Here is one way to determine the number of phone numbers that need to be reserved based on consumer interest and traffic:

1. Find out the average number of visits to the website over the last 72 hours

2. Plug those numbers into the subsequent formula

The number of visits for the last 72 hours / 3 days / 100

Suppose that the number of website visits is 6000. The following result is obtained when the formula is applied:

6000 / 3 / 100 = 20

So, this means you need to reserve about 20 numbers for your business tracking pool. In some cases, service providers will even permit you to automate your service pools.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Tracking Numbers, and What Are the Alternatives?

There are benefits and drawbacks to using a phone tracking number, which is not a secret. Even though dynamic number insertion helps businesses improve their digital marketing performance, there are also specific drawbacks.

Now, let us examine in more detail the advantages and drawbacks of tracking telephone call interactions with dedicated numbers.

Advantages:

• Increased marketing ROI
• Access to more detailed caller information
• High retention and conversion rates
• Capability to optimise media spend
• Upgraded marketing messaging

Drawbacks:

• Customers may be confused by multiple phone numbers
• Having too many numbers could affect SEO rankings
• There are additional costs for toll-free, vanity, or local tracing numbers
• DNI requires that marketing materials be updated often
• Not having enough reserved numbers in the tracking pool could make it harder to track leads

This approach continues to be the most prevalent among brands, in spite of all the disadvantages. If you’re searching for alternatives, however, you may want to use Google’s services to track inbound calls and ad conversions.

Making sure that your brand is equipped with the appropriate solutions is crucial for the success of your marketing endeavours. So, the best approach is to integrate call tracking data with other martech solutions, such as HubSpot, Google Analytics, or Salesforce.

Best Practices for Implementing Call Tracking Numbers

In order to assess marketing effectiveness and successfully recalibrate marketing strategies, including caller information and other things, the majority of businesses that are customer-facing need to use the right call intelligence solution and monitor toll-free numbers.

Here are a few of the most effective practices for implementing trackable phone numbers:

• Niche marketing: Companies that serve customers in the healthcare, insurance, home services, or legal business can identify top-performing advertising campaigns, record phone calls, enhance the customer experience, and create a seamless customer journey.
• Financial companies: Customers often have a lot of questions about insurance, mortgages, and loans. By employing trackable phone numbers and a call intelligence solution, financial companies can build trust, provide personalised customer service, and obtain the necessary caller information.
• Travel companies and hotels: With call tracking features, such as trackable phone numbers, businesses can optimise their marketing expenditure, deliver personalised customer experiences across all touchpoints, and identify the channels that generate the most calls.

Utilise Call Tracking Software to Track Calls

Nowadays, marketing experts cannot afford to overlook how crucial it is to track inbound calls. It is an efficient way of data collection that may help brands create customisable journeys, understand the performance of different marketing campaigns, and boost revenue.

Book a demo to learn how Phonexa’s Call Logic can assist you in capturing phone call data, streamlining your campaigns, and boosting your conversions.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I find out where a call tracking number routes to?

When you get a trackable phone number, you need to assign it a destination number. The phone number can be any of your business numbers. This ensures that each customer who calls one of your local or toll-free tracking numbers will be directed to the destination number of your choosing.

How can I obtain a phone number to track calls in Google Ads?

The quantity of call tracking numbers you may get will vary depending on the call tracking service provider. Customers are usually not required to purchase phone numbers; instead, they may lease vanity, local, and toll-free tracking numbers and use them for a variety of campaigns, such as Google Ads.

If you are a Phonexa client, the following brief guide will provide you with the necessary information to integrate our Call Logic platform with Google Analytics.

Is it advisable to add a hard-coded call tracking number to the website or landing page?

The addition of hard-coded telephone tracking numbers to landing pages or websites is not recommended. DNI can, however, evaluate the referring URL, landing page, or website to ascertain whether it is necessary to substitute the hard-coded number with one from your tracking pool.

Are you unfamiliar with the concept of call tracing as a whole? View this 10-minute guide on Conversation Intelligence & Call Tracking.