Call Tracking & Conversions: Take Your Reporting to the Next Level
Call Tracking allows companies to track incoming and outgoing phone calls back to marketing campaigns. It can also provide a great deal of value from a performance management perspective with call recordings enabling teams to keep quality high through review processes. Sales teams can use the recordings and transcriptions to quickly recall past call details to stay fresh on pending deals. Marketing teams can learn and stay clear on the marketing channels that bring in the most phone calls and by measuring the phone calls that convert.
I wanted to delve deeper into the methods you can use to track actual conversions from the phone and the value this can have to a marketer and business.
To start, let’s talk about how we link calls back to online campaigns: Using our visitor matching methodology, we can easily track which visitor (session/user) on the target website that placed a phone call. Our system does this uniquely by, not just rotating numbers through a pool, but also observing the correlation between user session and caller data. We can rule out specific sessions based on lack of information and we can narrow in on specific callers through address and visitor IP. Using the session information we can trigger events into Google Analytics – capturing valuable ad spend data along the way.
There are number of different approaches you can take to tracking sale conversions from phone calls. I’ll discuss some of the pros and cons of each approach.
- Tracking calls as conversions through a simple automatic Calls event into Google Analytics
- Tracking phone call sales as conversions via a post call survey
- Tracking sales captured via your CRM
Google Analytics Call Conversions
By connecting your CallTrackingMetrics account to Google Analytics and installing our tracking code we can start capturing session data and sending it as an event into Google Analytics. The value of this is you now have events in GA that correspond to each phone call you have received and relate back to each session, providing Adwords data and channel specific data. With the events flowing into your GA account you can configure a goal in GA to capture events as conversions. Finally this allows Adwords to collect the conversions and use them for optimization of your advertising budget.
Tracking Phone Call Sales as Conversions
The call log in CallTrackingMetrics allows you to mark phone calls as a sale, triggering a specific CallSale event into GA. This event is different from our standard “Calls” event in that it sets the event value to the user entered dollar amount. Meaning the calls that you mark as having generated a sale will be linked to real revenue and those events when converted in GA and imported into Adwords can provide a real indicator of which marketing channel is providing real revenue. We allow you to mark a phone call as a conversion either manually in the call log by clicking on the scoring column (name is customizable) or by setting up a Post Call Survey. The Post Call Survey has two main options either you can use our standard prompt to capture the sales information post call (e.g. when the caller hangs up with the agent) or you can configure your own custom menu to collect information such as “order id” for e-commerce call tracking or a quality metric of your choosing.
Tracking Sales Captured via your CRM (such as Salesforce)
We can take the concept of marking a call as a sale one step further and with integration into your CRM (Salesforce as an example) we can capture the sales revenue when leads are converted. Or revenue is received from opportunity or account. By providing API access to call sales and by knowing which leads are associated to specific phone calls we can tie revenue recorded in Salesforce back to a specific Adwords click. This makes it possible to trigger a “CallSale” event into GA and capture that conversion in Adwords.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help track calls and conversions for your organization.