The term “trackable phone numbers” may be new to you. It has nothing to do with “Find my iPhone” or figuring out the number of that scam company that keeps calling you. Instead, trackable phone numbers are something positive; a tool that can aid you in your marketing goals and help you figure out where to spend your advertising dollars.
If you’re using targeted paid search to drive phone calls to your business, you’re already employing one of the best methods available to generate quality phone leads. Good for you! Now, it’s time to take everything one step further with trackable phone numbers.
What are trackable phone numbers?
The idea behind trackable phone numbers is quite simple.
- Obtain some custom phone numbers. You can get these through CallRail, Google Voice, Grasshopper, or other mediums.
- Assign one to each ad campaign (PPC ads, TV ads, billboards, website, etc.) and forward these to your main cell number or landline if you still have one.
- Be sure those numbers are readily available and visible in your advertising.
- Using an app, track how many calls you get from each number.
Tracking your results
Of course, once you have these phone numbers set up, it’s essential to know if they’re working for you and which ones work the best. To do that, you need to determine a way to track your results.
There are several ways to do that. By setting up phone clicks as goals, a service such as Google AdWords or Microsoft Ad Center can handle the tracking. For email marketing, if you use a program like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact, you can add tracking to linked phone numbers you’ve assigned to your advertising. For print advertising, you’ll have to check your call logs from whatever service you use, like Google Voice.
Finally, using trackable phone numbers for your website isn’t that difficult. You’ll need to add a code to the phone number, which will fire an event in Google Analytics (or similar). Your website builder can help you set that up so that your hits are easily trackable.
Benefits of trackable phone numbers
Trackable phone numbers provide many advantages for savvy business owners:
- You can determine what’s working quickly. If you’re spending thousands on a billboard by the highway but not getting any calls from it, you’ll know within a short time if it’s not worth your investment, for example. Instead, if you find that most of the calls are coming from your website, you’ll know it’s time to invest more to upgrade and strengthen it.
- You can correctly assess your marketing efforts. Sometimes, we get stuck in a pattern. Your pattern might involve believing that a particular ad campaign is working better than it truly is. Trackable numbers give you the facts, so there’s no guesswork involved.
- You can save valuable advertising dollars but putting them in the right place. You’ll have a better understanding of how customers get to you; as such, you can place your money where you’ll recognize the most financial gain.
- You can integrate call tracking with other tools you use daily, such as Salesforce, Google Analytics, or other software. This way, you and your team will get a seamless view of your overall marketing performance, all in one place.
- Tracking phone calls helps you figure out your return on investment and allows you to continue to invest appropriately in marketing campaigns you’re considering in the future.
Starting the process
Call tracking isn’t all that difficult, and you can start on a very basic level that costs your company little or nothing. You can also choose to do something a bit more advanced or may graduate to that after you’ve experimented with basic tracking.
Initially, you may need some technical expertise to get things rolling. The professionals at Watershed9 are available to help you get started. We can provide the details about securing numbers, adding them to your website, tracking them, and more. For further information on how to make your marketing dollars work for you, call us at 604-337-1449.