For a Greensboro plumber, a Winston-Salem personal injury attorney, or a High Point HVAC company, the phone is the primary conversion. Form submissions are nice. Phone calls are revenue. The problem is that most service businesses have no idea which website visitor became which phone call. Call tracking solves that.
Why Form Tracking Alone Misses the Picture
Service businesses with high-urgency offerings see roughly five to ten phone calls for every contact form submission. If your dashboard counts only forms, you are measuring a fraction of the marketing return. Worse, you cannot tell whether your investment in SEO, AdWords, or Yelp produced more phone calls or fewer.
How Call Tracking Actually Works
A call-tracking service provisions a unique local Triad phone number for each marketing source you want to measure. When a visitor lands on your site, JavaScript dynamically replaces the phone number on the page with the tracking number tied to their traffic source. Calls to that number ring through to your real business line, with the source attribution captured in a dashboard.
The Tracking Numbers to Set Up First
- →Organic Google search. All visitors arriving from a Google search result.
- →Google AdWords. Visitors arriving from a paid Google ad. Critical for proving AdWords ROI.
- →Yelp and other directories. Visitors arriving from referring sites like Yelp, Citysearch, Yellowpages.com.
- →Direct and bookmarked traffic. Visitors who typed your URL or used a bookmark.
- →Yellow Pages print ad. A separate tracking number printed only in the Yellow Pages ad. Often the data here ends the contract at renewal.
What the Data Reveals
- →Real cost per call by channel. $14 per call from organic SEO vs. $48 per call from AdWords vs. $240 per call from Yellow Pages. Numbers like these reset budget conversations immediately.
- →Call duration patterns. Short calls usually mean wrong number, hang-up, or unqualified caller. Long calls are real prospects.
- →Call recordings for staff training. Listening to how your front desk handles inbound calls is often more valuable than any marketing change you can make.
- →Missed-call patterns. Many Triad businesses discover they miss 15 to 30 percent of inbound calls during business hours, simply because the front desk is busy.
Cost and Setup Time
Most call-tracking services run between $30 and $150 a month for a small Triad service business with five to ten tracking numbers. Setup takes one afternoon. The first month of data almost always pays for the next year of service through the budget reallocations it justifies.
Read the companion pieces on installing Google Analytics and setting up goal conversions, or have our digital marketing agency install call tracking and tie every call back to a marketing source.