Using call tracking to measure advertising performance

In all Internet projects, where more than 30% of orders are made by phone, it is advisable to use tracking of calls from the site. What types of call tracking are there and how it looks in an advertising account, read our article

Every marketer or business owner has faced a problem when it is impossible to fully assess the performance of any advertising channel due to the small amount of data. Usually, websites track targeted conversion actions: form filling, shopping cart, chat, transactions and do not pay due attention to tracking calls, which can also lead to a purchase. With insufficient data, you will not be able to objectively measure the effectiveness and optimize advertising channels.

Call-tracking is a technology that allows you to track calls by phone and assign them to a specific traffic source. Its use is especially necessary if the share of calls made through telephone calls is more than 30%.

Integration of call tracking on the site will be able to help correctly assess the effectiveness of each of the traffic channels, focusing not only on the data on conversions and transactions, but also taking into account the calls that subsequently led to the order of a product or service.

Also, an undeniable advantage is the ability to listen to phone calls. There is often a situation where advertising campaigns bring leads, but managers are reluctant to respond or illiterately advise potential customers.

For example, you have a tire and wheel shop. You advertise on radio, Facebook and Google Ads. Transactions come from all sources of online advertising, but some campaigns spend more money, but they have few orders placed through the basket. In addition, you do not know how the customers who made the call found out about you. Call tracking systems exist to solve exactly this problem.

Now there are a large number of call tracking services on the market: from search engines or presented as separate products. They may differ visually, pricing policy, additional services, and so on. Their operating principle is similar.

There are two types of calltecking: static and dynamic.

The essence of static call tracking is that each traffic source is assigned its own unique phone number. The amount of data that we receive is limited by the number of calls from a particular channel. If we talk about contextual advertising, then it is impossible to assess the effectiveness of paid traffic in the context of an advertising campaign, ad group, keyword using static call tracking.

To install static call tracking on your site, you will need to order numbers depending on the number of advertising channels and install the call tracking code on the site. Assign a unique UTM-tag to each number, according to which the data on calls will be sent to Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica or another web analytics system.

The essence of dynamic call tracking is number substitution. A specific phone number is assigned to a specific user session and is shown to each unique user. Thus, we can track the client down to the search query and get more data for analysis.

Installation of dynamic call tracking is provided by the service itself and takes approximately two hours. It is also possible to integrate the code through Google Tag Manager.

When choosing the type of call tracking, you need to start from your analysis needs. If you are only interested in the distribution of calls by source, then it will be enough to use static call tracking. This type of call tracking is cheaper.

If you need detailed analysis broken down by device types, keywords, cities, and so on, then dynamic call tracking is needed.

It is also important to say about the additional functions that call tracking services provide. Such as a callback widget and online chat, which often make it easier to get a call from a visitor than filling out forms.

For example, you have a lending page with a specific service. You’ve run PPC ads across multiple sources and are tracking a successful form submission on the page. Also, the site contains a phone number that can be used by potential customers who have switched to the site through advertisements.

Based on the data on the successful submission of forms, we will not be able to correctly analyze and further optimize advertising campaigns, since the distribution of forms and calls by sources, campaigns and other components can be radically different.

This is where call tracking will help us. You will be able to compare the number of calls and leads from the site, see which advertising campaigns, keywords cost you less, disable ineffective keywords, audiences, device types, cities, and so on.

This tool will allow you to get a more complete picture of hits and identify strengths and weaknesses in your advertising based on effectiveness.

After installing a call tracking system, you see conversion data in your account or analytics systems. You can see how it looks clearly in the screenshots below.

The given project is an advertising account for an insurance company.

You can see that for advertising campaigns on mobile phones, they call more often. While on stationary computers, they often leave applications on the site. If call tracking was not working, we would not be able to track this data.

In the screenshots, we see data on conversions at the level of advertising campaigns, keywords, search queries, not only with successful form submission, but also about calls made on the website or in the ad.

Thus, the installation of call tracking on the site will help you in analyzing the effectiveness of traffic and optimizing advertising campaigns. This will help you understand which channels or campaigns are worth investing in and which don’t work with your business.