Call tracking is becoming a must-have for companies who wish to measure how many phone calls they receive from their marketing efforts. This online tool allows marketing experts to obtain accurate inbound phone call data for their company.
And call tracking can be broken down into two, or even three different categories. The main two types of call tracking are static and dynamic call tracking.
As static call tracking is about using tracking numbers to measure inbound calls for online and offline mediums, dynamic call tracking brings a deeper level of data. Here are the main questions it can help you with:
- How are online visitors who call you getting to your Web pages? Where are these visitors coming from? Dynamic call tracking by traffic source is the best feature to answer these.
- Which of your site’s pages have visitors seen, or which keywords have they searched before calling your company? This can be answered with dynamic call tracking by Web session.
This article dives into these different types of call tracking and how they work. So you can easily adapt your call tracking solution to your own needs.
Dynamic call tracking by traffic source: reveal acquisition channels’ efficiency
First, let’s talk about dynamic call tracking by traffic source. With this type of call tracking, you can analyze more precisely your digital ROI, thanks to dynamic number insertion (DNI) feature.
What dynamic call tracking by traffic source needs to work efficiently is your contact phone number on your website. The thing is that your visitors are using several traffic sources such as SEO, emailing campaigns, advertisement portals and more, to get to your pages. With this type of call tracking, your contact phone number will dynamically swap with a unique tracking number dedicated to each of these traffic sources, and this is the number your visitors will call you from. Eventually, you can collect inbound phone call data from each of your traffic sources:
- Number of calls received per source
- Number or answered calls
- Number of missed calls
- Average call duration, …
To give you a better insight, let’s take an example. Imagine a company using three different traffic sources to display a link on their site’s homepage:
- SEO on Google
- Sponsored Google Ads campaigns
- Sponsored Facebook campaigns
With dynamic call tracking, this company can add a national or local tracking number for each of these traffic sources. Then, as illustrated below, a visitor making a search on Google to get to the company’s website sees a different contact phone number than a visitor who came from a Facebook post or a Google Ads sponsored link.
Thanks to this, the company can easily identify which traffic sources are generating the most important amount of inbound calls from their website, and more, which of these traffic sources are providing the highest ROI. On the middle and long term, it allows teams to define the most efficient marketing acquisition channels, and easily adapt their strategy to budget and performance constraints.
Dynamic call tracking by Web session: analyze your callers’ online journey
Dynamic call tracking by Web session brings you data about the specific pages viewed by your visitors on your website, or ad groups, ads and even Google Ads keywords they have searched before landing to your website.
In most cases, your online visitors need several steps with your marketing mediums and campaigns before converting into customers. As an example, a visitor can first get on your website through a sponsored ad, then continue searching on other sites, and finally get back to yours directly and give you a phone call. In such situations, dynamic call tracking by Web session is efficient to understand which steps in the customer journey were essential for the conversion to happen.
This more advanced type of call tracking is also based on dynamic number insertion. The main difference is that each visitor on your website gets a dedicated tracking number for his or her whole online session. So all your visitor’s multichannel browsing data is saved by the call tracking tool, and you can find it in your account’s reports or directly in Google Analytics.
Then, even more than analyzing how your multichannel funnels are performing, you can also assess the efficiency of each online touchpoint before a conversion via phone call.
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So, which type of call tracking is the most appropriate?
Depending on your business needs and challenges, you can get enough data with dynamic call tracking by traffic source… Or aiming at a deeper lever of analysis, given that dynamic call tracking by Web session also includes the features to assess your cost per phone lead and your traffic sources’ ROI.
To make the best choice, you need to consider your marketing objectives about your inbound phone calls. Which level of data accuracy and which KPIs do you need to learn more about your callers who contact you from your site?
In any case, we will be happy to help if you have any question about dynamic call tracking, or need to talk more specifically about your company and context. Feel free to contact us!
