The Importance of Call Tracking to Online Marketing

The world of marketing has changed significantly, and the reason for that can be attributed to the Internet. Thanks to social media, advertising mediums like Google Adwords, and mobile devices it has become a marketing space that you simply can’t ignore. In fact, it’s extremely vital that you now have at least some kind of online marketing campaign. That being said, you cannot forget about traditional platforms and mediums. There are still a very large number of customers that will call your business directly for more information.

When it comes to online marketing there are a lot of tracking tools that help you analyze where customers are coming from, what they want and what’s attracting them. With a traditional phone based system those types of marketing analytics aren’t available, and in most cases it’s not even possible to collect them. This is extremely unfortunate because a modern and growing business needs access to data like that at all times.

What?

That’s exactly where call tracking comes in, and more specifically website call tracking. There are situations where a marketing medium will direct customers to call you. Furthermore, there are usually different avenues leading them to call. With multiple sources, it’s important that you are able to assess and understand where a majority of calls are coming from.

For example, if you can tell an influx of customers are calling due to a new website design instead of online magazine ads this affords you valuable information that you can use in the future.

Why?

Call tracking is a very important element of a successful online marketing campaign. Knowing where leads come from and how many have been generated is just as important as knowing how much traffic your business website has, or how many successful clicks a particular advertisement has garnered. This is all data and information that can be used to hone a marketing strategy, and more importantly it can be used to understand your customer base.

Simply put, call tracking allows you to measure how effective a marketing campaign really is thus allowing you to adjust your focus for better performance.

How?

There are many ways to implement a call tracking system, but one of the most obvious is to hire an agency to collect and analyze the information. Realistically, that’s one of the best options because the provider will handle all the necessary logistics. Since understanding the data is going to take just as much work as collecting it –if not more- it only makes sense to lessen the workload.

Generally a provider has several different methods in place to help them track calls and the customers making them. Some of those methods include using online tools, utilizing various access points and more.

The measures in place generally allow you to track calls that are coming from a wide variety of sources such as the yellow pages, newspapers, magazines, television ads, radio, email and more. Such a system will help companies determine which marketing platform or campaign is generating the most bang for their buck, and just how effective it is.

When?

If you have an online marketing campaign in place, then it’s already a bit late- especially if the general focus is to generate phone based leads. You should act as quickly as possible to setup a call tracking system if that is the case.

If you’re entertaining the idea of a full scale online marketing campaign, then it’s best to adopt such a system at the same time. This will allow you to adapt the tracking system alongside an evolving marketing campaign, and believe us when we say your campaign will definitely change over time. For instance, you may start out by placing an emphasis on print ads, but discover later that your customer base used the number more from the digital media content to call the company.

If you’re a reputable business looking to push into the online marketing world, you’ll want all the research data that could possibly be associated with it. Tracking only online form conversions and online data even in today’s hyper-connected world will still cause you to miss a lot of important information when it comes to traditional platforms that can be obtained through call tracking.