Call tracking is one of the greatest tools that should be in every marketing manager’s arsenal. After all, some people would rather pick up a phone and talk to a human than fill out a form or converse over email. The problem is that once someone calls, you normally would lose data about where and how they found you. With a call tracking solution, you can get better data about their interaction. This is a well established tactic for paid media, but did you know it can be used for organic inquiries as well? Here are 4 ways to implement this important part of your marketing channels.
Why Do We Want to Use Call Tracking?
- Straight up analytics. Analytics programs don’t tell you whether someone visited your website by clicking on one of your regular organic listings or because they clicked on the Google My Business listing. Customers can also call your business directly from the result page without ever visiting your site. Without call tracking it’s nearly impossible to attribute conversions to your SEO efforts. And as a marketer, you need to know how ALL your efforts are adding to lead generation.
- Lead quality insights. This helps answer the critical question: Is the money we’re spending on marketing giving us high quality leads and customers? For example, if your local SEO efforts generated 10 calls but 7 of them were less than 10 seconds long, you can distinguish junk calls to true MQLs.
- Understand customer needs and pain points. Many call tracking solutions have the ability to record phone calls. There is so much value in hearing the words your customers are using and the questions they have. If the same question keeps coming up in all of the recordings, it indicates that the answer should either be added to the site or be made more prominent. Recordings give you valuable insights on what your customers need.
N.A.P. and Call Tracking
If you’ve dabbled in the realm of local SEO, you’ve likely heard of the term “NAP” which stands for name, address, and phone number. One of the fundamental rules about local SEO is that your business NAP must be the same across all your local listings and your website or local landing page.
With these NAP considerations, many people question whether or not they can still use call tracking phone numbers for local campaigns since that would affect NAP. The question asked is, “wouldn’t a different tracking phone number on your website break the NAP rules”? Yes, but there is a solution…let’s talk about how to get started.
How Do I Start Call Tracking for Local Search?
- Implement a Call Tracking Solution on Your Site – There are many excellent call tracking providers to choose from. Some examples include Invoca, DialogTech, CallRail, and more.
- Set Up Dynamic Number Insertion – Call tracking can dynamically swap out numbers shown on your website depending on how a user came to the site. Each call tracking provider does this differently, but in most cases it requires setting up a rule based on UTM parameters or referral information. In your Google My Business profile, you can add UTM parameters to your site’s URL so that you can set up a rule in the call tracking tool to serve a different number for traffic coming from Google My Business.
- Create a New Number Dedicated just to Google My Business – Dynamic number insertion can track users who come to your website from your Google my Business listing. But what happens if users call you from the number listed in Google My Business without ever going to your site? Contrary to popular belief, you can add a call tracking number as your primary number in Google My Business.
What Do I Do Now?
Setting up call tracking requires attention to detail to implement correctly. The data and insights you get once done are amazing. Atypical Digital can help. We work with companies of all sizes to improve their brand’s visibility in search and optimize the ways you reach customers. Contact us today and we can help you get started on the path to gaining full visibility into your marketing campaigns.